Related papers: Warping Away Gravitational Instabilities in Protop…
Astrophysical disks that are sufficiently cold and dense are linearly unstable to the formation of axisymmetric rings as a result of the disk's gravity. In practice, spiral structures are formed, which may in turn produce bound fragments.…
In this paper, we calculate simulated scattered light images of a circumstellar disk in which a planet is forming by gravitational instability. The simulated images bear no correlation to the vertically integrated surface density of the…
The discovery of wide-orbit giant exoplanets has posed a challenge to our conventional understanding of planet formation by coagulation of dust grains and planetesimals, and subsequent accretion of protoplanetary disk gas. As an alternative…
We present a numerical model for the evolution of a protostellar disc that has formed self-consistently from the collapse of a molecular cloud core. The global evolution of the disc is followed for several million years after its formation.…
Recent high angular resolution ALMA observations have revealed numerous gaps in protoplanetary disks. A popular interpretation has been that planets open them. Most previous investigations of planet gap-opening have concentrated on viscous…
Gravitational instabilities (GIs) are most likely a fundamental process during the early stages of protoplanetary disc formation. Recently, there have been detections of spiral features in young, embedded objects that appear consistent with…
In this paper we analyse the propagation of warps in protostellar circumbinary discs. We use these systems as a test environment in which to study warp propagation in the bending-wave regime, with the addition of an external torque due to…
Simulations of massive star formation predict the formation of discs with significant substructure, such as spiral arms and clumps due to fragmentation. Here we present a semi-analytic framework for producing synthetic observations of discs…
Previous simulations of self-gravitating protostellar disks have shown that, once developed, gravitational instabilities are enhanced by cooling the disk constantly during its evolution (Pickett et al. 2002). These earlier calculations…
We study the stability of gaps opened by a giant planet in a self-gravitating protoplanetary disc. We find a linear instability associated with both the self-gravity of the disc and local vortensity maxima which coincide with gap edges. For…
We carry out three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations to study planet-disc interactions for inclined high mass planets, focusing on the disc's secular evolution induced by the planet. We find that, when the planet is massive enough and…
Recent ALMA molecular line observations have revealed 3-D gas velocity structure in protoplanetary disks, shedding light on mechanisms of disk accretion and structure formation. 1) By carrying out viscous simulations, we confirm that the…
Protoplanetary disks can exhibit asymmetric temperature variations due to phenomena such as shadows cast by the inner disk or localized heating by young planets. We investigate the disk features induced by these asymmetric temperature…
We present a 3D semi-analytic model of self-gravitating discs, and include a prescription for dust trapping in the disc spiral arms. Using Monte-Carlo radiative transfer we produce synthetic ALMA observations of these discs. In doing so we…
Shadows are commonly observed in protoplanetary disks in near-infrared and (sub)millimeter images, often cast by misaligned inner disks or other obscuring material. While recent studies show that shadows can alter disk dynamics, only the…
It is expected that an average protostar will undergo at least one impulsive interaction with a neighbouring protostar whilst a large fraction of its mass is still in a massive, extended disc. If protostars are formed individually within a…
We present a modal analysis of instabilities of counter-rotating, self-gravitating collisionless stellar discs, using the recently introduced modified WKB formulation of spiral density waves for collisionless systems (Gulati \& Saini). The…
The canonical theory for planet formation in circumstellar disks proposes that planets are grown from initially much smaller seeds. The long-considered alternative theory proposes that giant protoplanets can be formed directly from…
Accretion discs are ubiquitous in the universe and it is a crucial issue to understand how angular momentum and mass are being radially transported in these objects. Here, we study the role played by non-linear spiral patterns within…
Context. Despite the recent discovery of spiral-shaped features in protoplanetary discs in the near-infrared and millimetric wavelengths, there is still an active discussion to understand how they formed. In fact, the spiral waves observed…