Related papers: The Snow Border
The early stages of planet formation are still not well understood. Coagulation models have revealed numerous obstacles to the dust growth, such as the bouncing, fragmentation and radial drift barriers. We study the interplay between dust…
We simulate the formation of a low metallicity (0.01 Zsun) stellar cluster in a dwarf galaxy at redshift z~14. Beginning with cosmological initial conditions, the simulation utilizes adaptive mesh refinement and sink particles to follow the…
Dusty disks around young stars are formed out of interstellar dust that consists of amorphous, submicrometre grains. Yet the grains found in comets and meteorites, and traced in the spectra of young stars, include large crystalline grains…
Millimeter interferometry provides evidence for the presence of mm to cm size "pebbles" in the outer parts of disks around pre-main-sequence stars. The observations suggest that large grains are produced relatively early in disk evolution…
Recent observations suggest that the first stages of planet formation likely take place in the Class 0/I phase of Young Stellar Object evolution, when the star and the disk are still embedded in an infalling envelope. In this study we…
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…
CO is thought to be the main reservoir of volatile carbon in protoplanetary disks, and thus the primary initial source of carbon in the atmospheres of forming giant planets. However, recent observations of protoplanetary disks point towards…
Rings and gaps are ubiquitous in protoplanetary disks. Larger dust grains will concentrate in gaseous rings more compactly due to stronger aerodynamic drag. However, the effects of dust concentration on the ring's thermal structure have not…
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…
We report on simulations of the formation of the first stars in the Universe, where we identify regions of hot atomic gas (fH2 < 10-6) at densities above 10-14 g/cc, heated to temperatures ranging between 3000 and 8000 K. Within this…
Luminosity bursts in young FU Orionis-type stars warm up the surrounding disks of gas and dust, thus inflicting changes on their morphological and chemical composition. In this work, we aim at studying the effects that such bursts may have…
The first off-lattice Monte Carlo kinetics model of interstellar dust-grain surface chemistry is presented. The positions of all surface particles are determined explicitly, according to the local potential minima resulting from the…
Pre-stellar cores represent the initial conditions in the process of star and planet formation. Their low temperatures ($<$10 K) allow the formation of thick icy dust mantles, which will be partially preserved in the future protoplanetary…
With climate modeling predicting a raise of at least 2 C by year 2100, the fate of ice has become a serious concern, but we still do not understand how ice grows (or melts). In the atmosphere, crystal growth rates of basal and prismatic…
Within the framework of The Heterogeneous dust Evolution Model at the IaS (THEMIS) this work investigates in detail the surface processes and chemistry relating to core/mantle interstellar and cometary grain structures and its influence on…
Highly porous dust aggregates can break through the radial drift barrier, but previous studies assumed disks in their later stage, where the disks have a very small mass and low temperature. In contrast, dust coagulation should begin in the…
Protoplanets of Super-Earth sizes may get trapped in convergence zones for planetary migration and form gas giants there. These growing planets undergo accretion heating, which triggers a hot-trail effect that can reverse migration…
Context. To form metre-sized pre-planetesimals in protoplanetary discs, growing grains have to decouple from the gas before they are accreted onto the central star during their phase of fast radial migration and thus overcome the so-called…
The thermal and chemical evolution of gravitationally collapsing protostellar clouds is investigated, focusing attention on their dependence on metallicity. Calculations are carried out for a range of metallicities spanning the local…
Context: Chemical models of dense cloud cores often utilize the so-called pseudo-time-dependent approximation, in which the physical conditions are held fixed and uniform as the chemistry occurs. In this approximation, the initial…