Related papers: Grain sedimentation inside giant planet embryos
Our understanding of the process of terrestrial planet formation has grown markedly over the past 20 years, yet key questions remain. This review begins by first addressing the critical, earliest stage of dust coagulation and concentration.…
How and when in the star formation sequence do dust grains start to grow into pebbles is a cornerstone question to both star and planet formation. We compute the polarized radiative transfer from a model solar-type protostellar core, using…
The initial stages of planet formation in circumstellar gas discs proceed via dust grains that collide and build up larger and larger bodies (Safronov 1969). How this process continues from metre-sized boulders to kilometre-scale…
The omnipresence of super-Earths suggests that they are able to be retained in natal disks around low-mass stars, whereas exoplanets' mass distribution indicates that some cores have transformed into gas giants through runaway gas accretion…
Context. We investigate the grain opacity k_gr in the atmosphere of protoplanets. This is important for the planetary mass-radius relation since k_gr affects the H/He envelope mass of low-mass planets and the critical core mass of giant…
Axisymmetric dust rings containing tens to hundreds of Earth masses of solids have been observed in protoplanetary discs with (sub-)millimetre imaging. Here, we investigate the growth of a planetary embryo in a massive (150M$_\oplus$)…
We review the current theoretical understanding how growth from micro-meter sized dust to massive giant planets occurs in disks around young stars. After introducing a number of observational constraints from the solar system, from observed…
Gravitational instability has been invoked as a possible mechanism of giant planet formation in protoplanetary disks. Here we critically revise its viability by noting that for the direct production of giant planets it is not enough for…
We show that condensation is an efficient particle growth mechanism, leading to growth beyond decimeter-sized pebbles close to an ice line in protoplanetary discs. As coagulation of dust particles is frustrated by bouncing and…
A big question in the field of star and planet formation is the time at which substantial dust grain growth occurs. The observed properties of dust emission across different wavelength ranges have been used as an indication that…
The growth of dust grains in protoplanetary disks is a necessary first step towards planet formation. This growth has been inferred via observations of thermal dust emission towards mature protoplanetary systems (age >2 million years) with…
It has been proposed recently that the first step in the formation of both rocky and gas giant planets is dust sedimentation into a solid core inside a gas clump (giant planet embryo). The clumps are then assumed to migrate closer to 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…
Understanding the growth of the cores of giant planets is a difficult problem. Recently, Lambrechts and Johansen (2012; LJ12) proposed a new model in which the cores grow by the accretion of pebble-size objects, as the latter drift towards…
High-resolution millimetre-imaging of protoplanetary discs has revealed many containing rings and gaps. These rings can contain large quantities of dust, often in excess of 10M$_\oplus$, providing prime sites for efficient and rapid planet…
Context: In protoplanetary discs, micron-sized dust grows to form millimetre- to centimetre-sized pebbles but encounters several barriers during its evolution. Collisional fragmentation and radial drift impede further dust growth to…
To treat the problem of growing protoplanetary disc solids across the meter barrier, we consider a very simplified two-component coagulation-fragmentation model that consists of macroscopic boulders and smaller dust grains, the latter being…
Gravitationally unstable disks can fragment and form bound objects provided that their cooling time is short. In protoplanetary disks radiative cooling is likely to be too slow to permit formation of planets by fragmentation within several…
An unsolved issue in the standard core accretion model for gaseous planet formation is how kilometre-sized planetesimals form from, initially, micron-sized dust grains. Solid growth beyond metre sizes can be difficult both because the…
In models of planetary accretion, pebbles form by dust coagulation and rapidly migrate toward the central star. Planetesimals may continuously form from pebbles over the age of the protoplanetary disk by yet uncertain mechanisms. Meanwhile,…