Related papers: Irradiated Disks May Settle into Staircases
Stars form when filaments and dense cores in molecular clouds fragment and collapse due to self-gravity. In the most basic analyses of gravitational stability, the competition between self-gravity and thermal pressure sets the critical…
Understanding the thermal structure of protoplanetary disks is crucial for modeling planet formation and interpreting disk observations. We present a new two-layer radiative transfer model for computing the thermal structure of axisymmetric…
(Abridged) We analyse the stability and evolution of power-law accretion disc models. These have midplane densities that follow radial power-laws, and have either temperature or entropy distributions that are power-law functions of…
In the dynamics of accretion disks, the presence of collective effects associated with the self-gravity of the disk is expected to affect not only the momentum transport, but also the relevant energy balance equations, which could differ…
We present the results of a series of radiation-MHD simulations of a local patch of an accretion disk, with fixed vertical gravity profile but with different surface mass densities and a broad range of radiation to gas pressure ratios. Each…
Spiral perturbations in a gravitationally unstable accretion disk regulate disk evolution through angular-momentum transport and heating and provide an observational signature of gravitational instability (GI). We use global 3D simulations…
The streaming instability for solid particles in protoplanetary disks is re-examined assuming the familiar alpha ($\alpha$) model for isotropic turbulence. Turbulence always reduces the growth rates of the streaming instability relative to…
Recent work by Pringle and by Maloney, Begelman & Pringle has shown that geometrically thin, optically thick, accretion disks are unstable to warping driven by radiation torque from the central source. In this paper we generalize the study…
Deeply embedded protostars are actively fed from their surrounding envelopes through their protostellar disk. The physical structure of such early disks might be different from that of more evolved sources due to the active accretion. We…
The relationship between the geometrical properties of stellar disks (a flatness and truncation radius) and the disk kinematics are considered for edge-on galaxies. It is shown that the observed thickness of the disks and the approximate…
Spinning ice discs in nature have been reported for more than a century, yet laboratory experiments have yielded diverse observations and contradictory explanations, leaving the mechanism behind the disc motion elusive. Here we combine…
Many stars host planets orbiting within a few astronomical units (AU). The occurrence rate and distributions of masses and orbits vary greatly with the host stars mass. These close planets origins are a mystery that motivates investigating…
The disk instability mechanism for giant planet formation is based on the formation of clumps in a marginally-gravitationally unstable protoplanetary disk, which must lose thermal energy through a combination of convection and radiative…
We calculated the bolometric images of relativistic slim disks during radiation-pressure-driven thermal instability. When the mass-accretion rate exceeds the critical one, an inner region of the standard accretion disk bursts to change to a…
Colloidal particles are often seen as big atoms that can be directly observed in real space. They are therefore playing an increasingly important role as model systems to study processes of interest in condensed matter physics such as…
Magnetorotational instability (MRI) is the most promising mechanism behind accretion in low-mass protostellar disks. Here we present the first analysis of the global structure and evolution of non-ideal MRI-driven T-Tauri disks on…
The streaming instability is the leading model for planetesimal formation in protoplanetary disks, but it typically operates within the first ~Myr. In the Solar System, however, some planetesimals (the chondrite parent bodies) formed 2-4…
Astronomers generally assume planet-forming disks are aligned with the rotation of their host star. However, recent observations have shown evidence of warping in protoplanetary disks. One can measure the statistical alignment between the…
A long-standing puzzle in the study of black-hole accretion concerns the presence or not of thermal instability. Classical theory predicts the encircling accretion disk is unstable, as do some self-consistent MHD simulations of the flow.…
We examine the origin of radial and vertical gradients in the age/metallicity of the stellar component of a galaxy disc formed in the APOSTLE cosmological hydrody- namical simulations. Some of these gradients resemble those in the Milky…