Related papers: Evidence for universality in the initial planetesi…
The streaming instability is a promising mechanism to induce the formation of planetesimals. Nonetheless, this process has been found in previous studies to require either a dust-to-gas surface density ratio or a dust size that is enhanced…
Axisymmetric dust rings are a ubiquitous feature of young protoplanetary disks. These rings are likely caused by pressure bumps in the gas profile; a small bump can induce a traffic jam-like pattern in the dust density, while a large bump…
In a turbulent proto-planetary disk, dust grains undergo large density fluctuations and under the right circumstances, these grain overdensities can overcome shear, turbulent, and gas pressure support to collapse under self-gravity (forming…
We investigate the formation of planetesimals via the gravitational instability of solids that have settled to the midplane of a circumstellar disk. Vertical shear between the gas and a subdisk of solids induces turbulent mixing which…
Planetesimals are compact astrophysical objects roughly 1-1000 km in size, massive enough to be held together by gravity. They can grow by accreting material to become full-size planets. Planetesimals themselves are thought to form by…
We present three-dimensional numerical simulations of particle clumping and planetesimal formation in protoplanetary disks with varying amounts of solid material. As centimeter-size pebbles settle to the mid-plane, turbulence develops…
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…
Using self-consistent models of turbulent particle growth in an evolving protoplanetary nebula of solar composition we find that recently proposed local metallicity and Stokes number criteria necessary for the streaming instability to…
Laboratory experiments indicate that direct growth of silicate grains via mutual collisions can only produce particles up to roughly millimeters in size. On the other hand, recent simulations of the streaming instability have shown that…
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…
The collapse of dust particle clouds directly to km-sized planetesimals is a promising way to explain the formation of planetesimals, asteroids and comets. In the past, this collapse has been studied in stratified shearing box simulations…
The cores of wide-orbit giant planets can form via pebble accretion if large planetesimals form in the outer regions of protoplanetary discs at sufficiently early times. Streaming instability simulations support mass distributions…
We present evidence that it is unlikely that the streaming instability (SI) can form planetesimals from mm grains inside axisymmetric pressure bumps. We conducted the largest simulation of the SI so far (7 million CPU hours), consisting of…
Proposed mechanisms for the formation of km-sized solid planetesimals face long-standing difficulties. Robust sticking mechanisms that would produce planetesimals by coagulation alone remain elusive. The gravitational collapse of smaller…
A critical step toward the emergence of planets in a protoplanetary disk consists in accretion of planetesimals, bodies 1-1000 km in size, from smaller disk constituents. This process is poorly understood partly because we lack good…
Protoplanetary disks naturally emerge during protostellar core-collapse. In their early evolutionary stages, infalling material dominates their dynamical evolution. In the context of planet formation, this means that the conditions in young…
To avoid known difficulties in planetesimal formation such as the drift or fragmentation barriers, many scenarios have been proposed. However, in these scenarios, planetesimals form in general only at some specific locations in…
The streaming instability, as an example of instabilities driven by particle feedback on a gas flow, has been proven to have a major role in controlling the formation of planetesimals. Here, we present experiments to approach this situation…
The streaming instability is a promising mechanism for planetesimal formation. The instability can rapidly form dense clumps that collapse self-gravitationally, which is efficient for large dust grains with the Stokes number on the order of…
Streaming instability can be a very efficient way of overcoming growth and drift barriers to planetesimal formation. However, it was shown that strong clumping, which leads to planetesimal formation, requires a considerable number of large…