Related papers: Are passive protostellar disks stable to self-shad…
We investigate the growth or decay rate of the fundamental mode of even symmetry in a viscous accretion disc. This mode occurs in eccentric discs and is known to be potentially overstable. We determine the vertical structure of the disc and…
We consider the evolution of an isentropic thermal instability in the atomic zone of a photodissociation region (PDR). In this zone, gas heating and cooling are associated mainly with photoelectric emission from dust grains and…
We revisit the global linear theory of the vertical shear instability (VSI) in protoplanetary discs with an imposed radial temperature gradient. We focus on the regime in which the VSI has the form of a travelling inertial wave that grows…
If sufficiently irradiated by its central star, a protoplanetary disks falls into an equilibrium state exhibiting vertical shear. This state may be subject to a hydrodynamical instability, the `vertical shear instability' (VSI), whose…
Fragmentation of protostellar disks controls the growth of protostars and plays a key role in determining the final mass of newborn stars. In this paper, we investigate the structure and gravitational stability of the protostellar disks in…
The inner boundary of protoplanetary discs is structured by the dramatic opacity changes at the transition from the dust-containing to a dust-free zone. This paper explores the variety and limits of inner rim structures in passively heated…
In this paper we consider the effects of opacity regimes on the stability of self-gravitating protoplanetary discs to fragmentation into bound objects. Using a self-consistent 1-D viscous disc model, we show that the ratio of local cooling…
We identify and study a number of new, rapidly growing instabilities of dust grains in protoplanetary disks, which may be important for planetesimal formation. The study is based on the recognition that dust-gas mixtures are generically…
The properties and star formation processes in the far-outer disks of nearby spiral and dwarf irregular galaxies are reviewed. The origin and structure of the generally exponential profiles in stellar disks is considered to result from…
We present evidence that isolated growing discs, subject to internal spiral perturbations, thicken due to both heating \emph{and} radial migration. We show this by demonstrating that the thickness and vertical velocity dispersions of coeval…
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…
Thermally bistable fluid tends to self-organize into clouds of hot and cold material, which are internally uniform and separated by thin conduction fronts. The evolution of these clouds has been studied for isobaric systems, but when…
Context: Recent observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) have shown that the large dust aggregates observed at millimeter wavelengths settle to the midplane into a remarkably thin layer. Aims: We intend to find out if the…
The standard thin disk model predicts that when the accretion rate is over a small fraction of the Eddington rate, which corresponds to $L \ga 0.06 L_{Edd}$, the inner region of the disk is radiation-pressure-dominated and thermally…
The vertical shear instability (VSI) is widely believed to be effective in driving turbulence in protoplanetary disks. Prior studies on VSI exclusively exploit the reflecting boundary conditions (BCs) at the disk surfaces. VSI depends…
The velocity dispersion of cold interstellar gas, sigma, is one of the quantities that most radically affect the onset of gravitational instabilities in galaxy discs, and the quantity that is most drastically approximated in stability…
Heating by the central star is one of the key factors determining the physical structure of protoplanetary disks. Due to the large optical thickness in the radial direction, disk midplane regions are heated by the infrared radiation from…
We study the shape stability of disks moving in an external Laplacian field in two dimensions. The problem is motivated by the motion of ionization fronts in streamer-type electric breakdown. It is mathematically equivalent to the motion of…
Regions of disc galaxies with widespread star formation tend to be both gravitationally unstable and self-shielded against ionizing radiation, whereas extended outer discs with little or no star formation tend to be stable and unshielded on…
Using radiation hydrodynamics simulations in a local stratified shearing box with realistic equations of state and opacities, we explored the outcome of self-gravity at 50 AU in a protoplanetary disc irradiated by the central star. We found…