Related papers: Warping Away Gravitational Instabilities in Protop…
High-angular resolution observations at sub-millimeter/millimeter wavelengths of disks surrounding young stars have shown that their morphology is made of azimuthally-symmetric or point-symmetric substructures, in some cases with spiral…
Gravitational coupling between protoplanetary discs and planets embedded in them leads to the emergence of spiral density waves, which evolve into shocks as they propagate through the disc. We explore the performance of a semi-analytical…
Recent mid-infrared observations of young stellar objects have found significant variations possibly indicative of changes in the structure of the circumstellar disk. Previous models of this variability have been restricted to axisymmetric…
Recent observations of gaps and non-axisymmetric features in the dust distributions of transition disks have been interpreted as evidence of embedded massive protoplanets. However, comparing the predictions of planet-disk interaction models…
Recent ideas for the origin and persistence of the warps commonly observed in disc galaxies have focused on cosmic infall. We present N-body simulations of an idealized form of cosmic infall onto a disc galaxy and obtain a warp that closely…
We use high resolution numerical simulations to study whether gravitational instabilities within circumstellar discs can produce astrometrically detectable motion of the central star. For discs with masses of M_disc = 0.1 M_star, which are…
Protoplanetary discs may become dynamically unstable due to structure induced by an embedded giant planet. In this thesis, I discuss the stability of such systems and explore the consequence of instability on planetary migration. I begin…
In this paper we consider the evolution of small planetesimals in marginally stable, self-gravitating protoplanetary discs. The drag force between the disc gas and the embedded planetesimals generally causes the planetesimals to drift…
We present the results of high-resolution, three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamic simulations of the dynamics and formation of coherent, long-lived vortices in stably-stratified protoplanetary disks. Tall, columnar vortices that extend…
Young protoplanetary discs are expected to be gravitationally unstable, which can drive angular momentum transport as well as be a potential mechanism for planet formation. Gravitational instability is most prevalent in the outer disc where…
We study particle dynamics in local two-dimensional simulations of self-gravitating accretion discs with a simple cooling law. It is well known that the structure which arises in the gaseous component of the disc due to a gravitational…
Astrophysical discs are often warped, that is, their orbital planes change with radius. This occurs whenever there is a non-axisymmetric force acting on the disc, for example the Lense-Thirring precession induced by a misaligned spinning…
Magnetic interactions between a protostar and its accretion disc tend to induce warping in the disc and produce secular changes in the stellar spin direction, so that the spin axis may not always be perpendicular to the disc. This may help…
Warps are observed in a large fraction of disc galaxies, and can be due to a large number of different processes. Some of these processes might also cause vertical heating and flaring. Using a sample of galaxies simulated in their…
In this paper we discuss the influence of gravitational instabilities in massive protostellar discs on the dynamics of dust grains. Starting from a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulation, we have computed the evolution of the dust…
We study the self-consistent, linear response of a galactic disc to non-axisymmetric perturbations in the vertical direction as due to a tidal encounter, and show that the density distribution near the disc mid-plane has a strong impact on…
We report on the results of the first 3D SPH simulation of massive, gravitationally unstable protoplanetary disks with radiative transfer. We adopt a flux-limited diffusion scheme justified by the high opacity of most of the disk. The…
Numerical simulations of global three-dimensional (3D), self-gravitating discs with a gap opened by an embedded planet are presented. The simulations are customised to examine planetary gap stability. Previous results, obtained by Lin &…
In this paper we present simulated observations of massive self-gravitating circumstellar discs using the Atacama Large Millimetre/sub-millimetre Array (ALMA). Using a smoothed particle hydrodynamics model of a $0.2M_{\odot}$ disc orbiting…
Gravitational instabilities (GIs) are spiral distortions in a self-gravitating disk that appear wherever the local surface density and temperature become favorable for their growth. The restructuring of the disk as it becomes unstable, the…