Dust Evolution and the Formation of Planetesimals

By T. Birnstiel, M. Fang, Anders Johansen. 2016

198 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The solid content of circumstellar disks is inherited from the interstellar medium: dust particles of at most a micrometer in size. Protoplanetary disks are the environment where these dust grains need to grow at least 13 orders of magnitude in size. Our understanding of this growth process is far from complete, with different physics seemingly posing obstacles to this growth at various stages. Yet, the ubiquity of planets in our galaxy suggests that planet formation is a robust mechanism. This chapter focuses on the earliest stages of planet formation, the growth of small dust grains towards the gravitationally bound “planetesimals”, the building blocks of planets. We will introduce some of the key physics involved in the growth processes and discuss how they are expected to shape the global behavior of the solid content of disks. We will consider possible pathways towards the formation of larger bodies and conclude by reviewing some of the recent observational advances in the field.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d904dc6c2a0edcd04699915901e48f7ceaf7374

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. T. Birnstiel
2. D. Wilner
3. S. Andrews
4. Xue-Ning Bai
5. C. Dullemond
6. Zhaohuan Zhu
7. A. Hughes
8. L. Ricci

Citations in the corpus

• The Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP). I. Motivation, Sample, Calibration, and Overview (2018, result): “Those results provide strong qualitative support for evolutionary models of solids early in the planetesimal assembly process (e.g., Birnstiel & Andrews 2014; Testi et al. 2014; Birnstiel et al. 2016).”