English

Meso-scale Instability Triggered by Dust Feedback in Dusty Rings: Origin and Observational Implications

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2020-04-29 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

High spatial resolution observations of protoplanetary disks (PPDs) by ALMA have revealed many details that are providing interesting constraints on the disk physics as well as dust dynamics, both of which are essential for understanding planet formation. We carry out high-resolution, 2D global hydrodynamic simulations, including the effects of dust feedback, to study the stability of dusty rings. When the ring edges are relatively sharp and the dust surface density becomes comparable to the gas surface density, we find that dust feedback enhances the radial gradients of both the azimuthal velocity profile and the potential vorticity profile at the ring edges. This eventually leads to instabilities on meso-scales (spatial scales of several disk scale heights), causing dusty rings to be populated with many compact regions with highly concentrated dust densities on meso-scales. We also produce synthetic dust emission images using our simulation results and discuss the comparison between simulations and observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.06986,
  title  = {Meso-scale Instability Triggered by Dust Feedback in Dusty Rings: Origin and Observational Implications},
  author = {Pinghui Huang and Hui Li and Andrea Isella and Ryan Miranda and Shengtai Li and Jianghui Ji},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.06986},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

22 pages, 16 figures, Submitted to ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:15:22.001Z