Concentrating small particles in protoplanetary disks through the streaming instability

By Chao-Chin Yang, Anders Johansen, D. Carrera. 2016

209 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Laboratory experiments indicate that direct growth of silicate grains via mutual collisions can only produce particles up to roughly millimeters in size. On the other hand, recent simulations of the streaming instability have shown that mm/cm-sized particles require an excessively high metallicity for dense filaments to emerge. Using the numerical algorithm of Yang & Johansen (2016) for stiff mutual drag force, we revisit the investigations of Carrera et al. (2015) and perform simulations of small particles with significantly higher resolutions and longer simulation times. We find that particles of dimensionless stopping time $\tau_\mathrm{s} = 10^{-2}$ and $10^{-3}$ -- representing mm- and cm-sized particles interior of the water ice line -- concentrate themselves via the streaming instability at a solid abundance of a few percent. We thus revise the critical solid abundance curve of Carrera et al. (2015) for the regime of $\tau_\mathrm{s} \ll 1$. The solid density in the concentrated regions reaches values higher than the Roche density, indicating that gravitational contraction into planetesimals is possible. Our results hence bridge the gap in particle size between direct dust growth limited by bouncing and the streaming instability.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e47aa8ddef37adbca98b9425089456ded5fb50d4

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes

Citations in the corpus

Evidence for the formation of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko through gravitational collapse of a bound clump of pebbles (2017, methodology): “It is interesting to note that this size range falls right into the minimum of the metallicity-Stokes number curve derived by Yang et al. (2016) for the transition between non-SI and SI regimes of the PPD, assuming gas densities as in the minimum-mass solar nebula model.”
Planetesimal formation near the snowline: in or out? (2017, background): “Recently, Yang et al. (2016) have shown that the streaming instability mechanism can also work for small particles (τ ∼ 10−3).”