English

On dust entrainment in photoevaporative winds

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2016-07-14 v2 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics

Abstract

We investigate dust entrainment by photoevaporative winds in protoplanetary discs using dusty smoothed particle hydrodrodynamics (SPH). We use unequal-mass particles to resolve more than five orders of magnitude in disc/outflow density and a one-fluid formulation to efficiently simulate an equivalent magnitude range in drag stopping time. We find that only micron sized dust grains and smaller can be entrained in EUV driven winds. The maximum grain size is set by dust settling in the disc rather than aerodynamic drag in the wind. More generally, there is a linear relationship between the base flow density and the maximum entrainable grain size in the wind. A pileup of micron sized dust grains can occur in the upper atmosphere at critical radii in the disc as grains decouple from the low-density wind. Entrainment is a strong function of location in the disc, resulting in a size sorting of grains in the outflow---the largest grain being carried out between 1010--2020\,AU. The peak dust density for each grain size occurs at the inner edge of its own entrainment region.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1603.02899,
  title  = {On dust entrainment in photoevaporative winds},
  author = {Mark A. Hutchison and Daniel J. Price and Guillaume Laibe and Sarah T. Maddison},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.02899},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

20 pages, 13 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRAS