Related papers: Merging Criteria for Planetesimal Collisions
Collisions between centimeter- to decimeter-sized dusty bodies are important to understand the mechanisms leading to the formation of planetesimals. We thus performed laboratory experiments to study the collisional behavior of dust…
The origin of Mercury still remains poorly understood compared to the other rocky planets of the Solar System. One of the most relevant constraints that any formation model has to fulfill refers to its internal structure, with a predominant…
In planetary systems with sufficiently small inter-planet spacing, close encounters can lead to planetary collisions/mergers or ejections. We study the spin property of the merger products of two giant planets in a statistical manner using…
We study to which extent planetesimal accretion is affected by the perturbing presence of a compagnon star. We concentrate on one crucial parameter: the distribution of encounter velocities within the planetesimal swarm. We numerically…
More than half of stars reside in binary or multiple star systems and many planets have been found in binary systems. From theoretical point of view, however, whether or not the planetary formation proceeds in a binary system is a very…
The disk instability model is a promising pathway for giant planet formation in various conditions. At the moment, population synthesis models are used to investigate the outcomes of this theory, where a key ingredient of the disk…
In the standard model of core accretion, the formation of giant planets occurs by two main processes: first, a massive core is formed by the accretion of solid material; then, when this core exceeds a critical value (typically greater than…
Planetisimals are thought to be formed from the solid material of a protoplanetary disk by a process of dust aggregation. It is not known how growth proceeds to kilometre sizes, but it has been proposed that water ice beyond the snowline…
We investigate the outcomes of collisions between Mars-sized bodies through smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations, focusing on the transitions among ``merging'', ``hit-and-run'', and catastrophic disruption. By systematically…
One of the most challenging problems we face in our understanding of planet formation is how Jupiter and Saturn could have formed before the the solar nebula dispersed. The most popular model of giant planet formation is the so-called 'core…
Much of a planet's composition could be determined right at the onset of formation. Laboratory experiments can constrain these early steps. This includes static tensile strength measurements or collisions carried out under Earth's gravity…
Wind erosion is a destructive mechanism that completely dissolves a weakly bound object like a planetesimal into its constituent particles, if the velocity relative to the ambient gas and the local gas pressure are sufficiently high. 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…
Planetesimal belts are invoked to explain the prolonged existence of debris disks. Important parameters to model their collisional evolution and to compute the dust production rate are the intrinsic probability of collision $P_i$ and the…
For problems in astrophysics, planetary science and beyond, numerical simulations are often limited to simulating fewer particles than in the real system. To model collisions, the simulated particles (aka superparticles) need to be inflated…
We develop a simple model to predict the radial distribution of planetesimal formation. The model is based on the observed growth of dust to mm-sized particles, which drift radially, pile-up, and form planetesimals where the stopping time…
Although it is accepted that perfect-merging is not a realistic outcome of collisions, some researchers state that perfect-merging simulations can still be considered as quantitatively reliable representations of the final stage of…
Context. Circumstellar disks are known to contain a significant mass in dust ranging from micron to centimeter size. Meteorites are evidence that individual grains of those sizes were collected and assembled into planetesimals in the young…
We outline a scenario which traces a direct path from freely-floating nebula particles to the first 10-100km-sized bodies in the terrestrial planet region, producing planetesimals which have properties matching those of primitive meteorite…
Pebble accretion refers to the growth of planetary bodies through the accretion of pebble-sized particles. Pebbles are defined in terms of their aerodynamically size $\tau_s$, which describes the level of coupling to the disk gas.…