Related papers: Magrathea: Dust growth experiment in micro-gravity…
We study the conditions for collisions between planetesimals to be accretional or disruptive in turbulent disks, through analytical arguments based on fluid dynamical simulations and orbital integrations. In turbulent disks, the velocity…
Context. Current models of the size- and radial evolution of dust in protoplanetary disks generally oversimplify either the radial evolution of the disk (by focussing at one single radius or by using steady state disk models) or they assume…
Planet formation is a hugely dynamic process requiring the transport, concentration and assimilation of gas and dust to form the first planetesimals and cores. With access to extremely high spatial and spectral resolution observations at…
Context.Transition disks are believed to be the final stages of protoplanetary disks, during which a forming planetary system or photoevaporation processes open a gap in the inner disk, drastically changing the disk structure. From…
The dusty regolith covering the surfaces of asteroids and planetary satellites differs in size, shape, and composition from terrestrial soil particles and is subject to very different environmental conditions. Experimental studies of the…
In the past decade, ALMA observations have revealed that a large fraction of protoplanetary discs contains rings in the dust continuum. These rings are the locations where pebbles accumulate, which is beneficial for planetesimal formation…
Searches for young gas giant planets at wide separations have so far focused on techniques appropriate for compact (Jupiter sized) planets. Here we point out that protoplanets born through Gravitational Instability (GI) may remain in an…
Aims. We numerically investigated dust enrichment and growth during the initial stages of protoplanetary disk formation. A particular objective was to determine the effects of various growth barriers, mimicked by imposing a series of upper…
Measuring the amount of gas and dust in protoplanetary disks is a key challenge in planet formation studies. Here we provide a new set of dust depletion factors and relative mass surface densities of gas and dust for the innermost regions…
Aerodynamic theory predicts that dust grains in protoplanetary disks will drift radially inward on comparatively short timescales. In this context, it has long been known that the presence of a gap opened by a planet can alter the dust…
The icy satellites around Jupiter are considered to have formed in a circumplanetary disk. While previous models focused on the formation of satellites starting from satellitesimals, the question of how satellitesimals form from smaller…
Two basic routes for planetesimal formation have been proposed over the last few decades. One is a classical "slow-growth" scenario. Another one is particle concentration models, in which small pebbles are concentrated locally and then…
The early planetesimal growth proceeds through a sequence of sticking collisions of dust agglomerates. Very uncertain is still the relative velocity regime in which growth rather than destruction can take place. The outcome of a collision…
Rapid orbital drift of macroscopic dust particles is one of the major obstacles against planetesimal formation in protoplanetary disks. We reexamine this problem by considering porosity evolution of dust aggregates. We apply a porosity…
The bouncing barrier, a parameter combination at which dust particles in the protoplanetary disk always rebound in mutual collisions, is one of the crucial steps of planet formation. In the past years, several experiments have been…
Planet formation encompasses processes that span a remarkable 40 magnitudes in mass, ranging from collisions between micron-sized grains inherited from the ISM to the accretion of gas by giant planets. The planet formation process takes…
The increasing number of newly detected exoplanets at short orbital periods raises questions about their formation and migration histories. A particular puzzle that requires explanation arises from one of the key results of the Kepler…
It is often argued that gravitational instability of realistic protoplanetary discs is only possible at distances larger than $\sim 50$ au from the central star, requiring high disc masses and accretion rates, and that therefore disc…
To study the evolution of protoplanetary dust aggregates, we performed experiments with up to 2600 collisions between single, highly-porous dust aggregates and a solid plate. The dust aggregates consisted of spherical SiO$_2$ grains with…
Collections of micrometer sized solid particles immersed in plamsa are used to mimic many systems from solid state and fluid physics, due to their strong electrostatic interaction, their large inertia, and the fact that they are large…