"Revealing the Youngest Circumstellar Disks: Hiding in the Dust"

With advances in millimeter arrays, we are learning more about the protostellar environments around young stars. Although, we have a broad-brush picture of isolated low-mass star formation, circumstellar disks in very young systems, ages of 10^4 to 10^5, are poorly constrained observationally. We are missing the observational data necessary to quantify the evolution of the circumstellar disk during the critical time of early gas giant formation, planet migration, and the beginning of terrestrial planet formation. Overall, this limits theoretical work on the initial conditions of the disk and thus, the initial conditions of planet formation. Was our early circumstellar disk fundamentally different than the extrasolar planetary systems to date? I will discuss recent observations and physical constraints of the youngest disks. Looming on the horizon are the next generation of millimeter interferometers, so I will also present the bright future, focusing on the CARMA array.