Gas Flow across Gaps in Protoplanetary Disks

By S. Lubow, G. D’Angelo. 2005

209 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze the gas accretion flow through a planet-produced gap in a protoplanetary disk. We adopt the α-disk model and ignore effects of planetary migration. We develop a semianalytic, one-dimensional model that accounts for the effects of the planet as a mass sink and also carry out two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of a planet embedded in a disk. The predictions of the mass flow rate through the gap based on the semianalytic model generally agree with the hydrodynamic simulations at the 25% level. Through these models, we are able to explore steady state disk structures and over large spatial ranges. The presence of an accreting ~1MJ planet significantly lowers the density of the disk within a region of several times the planet's orbital radius. The mass flow rate across the gap (and onto the central star) is typically 10%-25% of the mass accretion rate outside the orbit of the planet, for planet-to-star mass ratios that range from 5 × 10-5 to 1 × 10-3.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a6066b3da2cdacb3bc38f3a2cba04d87361d678

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Formation of Giant Planets (2004, background): “Closer to the planet, gravitational interactions may alter this result (Lubow and D’Angelo 2006).”