Related papers: From Grains to Planetesimals: Les Houches Lecture
For a long time, gravitational instability in the disk of planetesimals has been suspected to be the main engine responsible for the beginning of dust growth, its advantage being that it provides for rapid growth. Its real importance in…
Planets are built from planetesimals: solids larger than a kilometer which grow by colliding pairwise. Planetesimals themselves are unlikely to form by two-body collisions; sub-km objects have gravitational fields individually too weak, and…
We show that small solids in low mass, turbulent protoplanetary disks collect into self-gravitating rings. Growth is faster than disk lifetimes and radial drift times for moderately strong turbulence, characterized by dimensionless…
We have studied formation of planetesimals at a radial pressure bump in a protoplanetary disk created by radially inhomogeneous magnetorotational instability (MRI), through three-dimensional resistive MHD simulations including dust…
We investigate the formation process of planetesimals from the dust layer by the gravitational instability in the gas disk using local $N$-body simulations. The gas is modeled as a background laminar flow. We study the formation process of…
One of the main problems in planet formation, hampering the growth of small dust to planetesimals, is the so-called radial-drift barrier. Pebbles of cm to dm sizes are thought to drift radially across protoplanetary discs faster than they…
Planetesimal formation via the streaming and gravitational instabilities of dust in protoplanetary disks requires a local enhancement of the dust-to-gas mass ratio. Radial drift of large grains toward pressure bumps in gas disks is a…
Kilometre-sized planetesimals form from pebbles of a range of sizes. We present the first simulations of the streaming instability that begin with a realistic, peaked size distribution, as expected from grain growth predictions. Our 3D…
We study the gravitational instability (GI) of small solids in a gas disk as a mechanism to form planetesimals. Dissipation from gas drag introduces secular GI, which proceeds even when standard GI criteria for a critical density or…
It is difficult to imagine a planet formation model that does not at some stage include a gravitationally unstable disc. Initially unstable gas-dust discs may form planets directly, but the high surface density required has motivated the…
The sticking of micron sized dust particles due to surface forces in circumstellar disks is the first stage in the production of asteroids and planets. The key ingredients that drive this process are the relative velocity between the dust…
Solid particles in protoplanetary disks that are sufficiently super-solar in metallicity overcome turbulence generated by vertical shear to gravitationally condense into planetesimals. Super-solar metallicities result if solid particles…
The core accretion scenario of planet formation assumes that planetesimals and planetary embryos are formed during the primordial, gaseous phases of the protoplanetary disk. However, how the dust particles overcome the traditional growth…
We analyze the gravitational collapse of solids subject to gas drag in a protoplanetary disk. We also study the stirring of solids by turbulent fluctuations to determine the velocity dispersion and thickness of the midplane particle layer.…
We develop simple, physically motivated models for drag-induced dust-gas streaming instabilities, which are thought to be crucial for clumping grains to form planetesimals in protoplanetary disks. The models explain, based on the physics of…
The size distribution of asteroids and Kuiper belt objects in the solar system is difficult to reconcile with a bottom-up formation scenario due to the observed scarcity of objects smaller than $\sim$100 km in size. Instead, planetesimals…
The formation of planetesimals is often accredited to collisional sticking of dust grains. The exact process is unknown, as collisions between larger aggregates tend to lead to fragmentation or bouncing rather than sticking. Recent…
Observations of protoplanetary disks provide information on planet formation and the reasons for the diversity of planetary systems. The key to understanding planet formation is the study of dust evolution from small grains to pebbles.…
The journey from dust particle to planetesimal involves physical processes acting on scales ranging from micrometers (the sticking and restructuring of aggregates) to hundreds of astronomical units (the size of the turbulent protoplanetary…
We discovered a new growth mode of dust grains to km-sized bodies in protoplanetary disks that evolve by viscous accretion and magnetically driven disk winds (MDWs). We solved an approximate coagulation equation of dust grains with…