English

Dust grains cannot grow to millimeter sizes in protostellar envelopes

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2022-12-14 v1

Abstract

A big question in the field of star and planet formation is the time at which substantial dust grain growth occurs. The observed properties of dust emission across different wavelength ranges have been used as an indication that millimeter-sized grains are already present in the envelopes of young protostars. However, this interpretation is in tension with results from coagulation simulations, which are not able to produce such large grains in these conditions. In this work, we show analytically that the production of millimeter-sized grains in protostellar envelopes is impossible under the standard assumptions about the coagulation process. We discuss several possibilities that may serve to explain the observed dust emission in the absence of in-situ grain growth to millimeter sizes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.01832,
  title  = {Dust grains cannot grow to millimeter sizes in protostellar envelopes},
  author = {Kedron Silsbee and Vitaly Akimkin and Alexei V. Ivlev and Leonardo Testi and Munan Gong and Paola Caselli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.01832},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted to ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-28T02:48:14.681Z