Introduction

Planets form within circumstellar disks composed of a mixture of gas and dust grains. These disks result from the gravitational collapse of rotating molecular cloud cores. They are initially rather massive and consist of about 0.3 M*, where M* is the mass of the central star (e.g. Yorke et al., 1995). In contrast, the minimum mass required to build the planets of our Solar System is only about 0.01 Solar masses (M⊙). Evidently, there are processes that redistribute the mass, transform the dust to larger particles, and disperse much of the gas and dust.

The processes which are responsible for the dispersal of the gas influence the formation of planets. For example, the timescale for gas dispersal as a function of the disk radius affects the composition of the resulting planetary system. As long as the dust particles are small enough to be tightly coupled to the gas, they follow the gas flow. If the gas is dispersed before the dust particles have had a chance to grow, all the dust will be lost and planetesimals and planets cannot form. Even if there is time for particles to coagulate and build sufficiently large rocky cores that can accrete gas (Pollack et al., 1996; Hubickyj et al., 2004), the formation of gas-giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn will be suppressed if the gas is dispersed before the accretion can occur.