Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published October 1, 2022 | public
Journal Article

Establishing Dust Rings and Forming Planets within Them

Abstract

Radio images of protoplanetary disks demonstrate that dust grains tend to organize themselves into rings. These rings may be a consequence of dust trapping within gas pressure maxima, wherein the local high dust-to-gas ratio is expected to trigger the formation of planetesimals and eventually planets. We revisit the behavior of dust near gas pressure perturbations enforced by a planet in two-dimensional, shearing-box simulations. While dust grains collect into generally long-lived rings, particles with a small Stokes parameter τₛ < 0.1 tend to advect out of the ring within a few drift timescales. Scaled to the properties of ALMA disks, we find that rings composed of larger particles (τₛ ≥ 0.1) can nucleate a dust clump massive enough to trigger pebble accretion, which proceeds to ingest the entire dust ring well within ∼1 Myr. To ensure the survival of the dust rings, we favor a nonplanetary origin and typical grain size τₛ ≲ 0.05–0.1. Planet-driven rings may still be possible but if so we would expect the orbital distance of the dust rings to be larger for older systems.

Additional Information

We thank the anonymous referee for providing a careful report that helped to improve the manuscript. We also thank Ruobing Dong, Jonathan Squires, and Andrew Youdin for helpful discussions and Ge (Wendy) Chen for providing preliminary analyses. E.J.L. gratefully acknowledges support by the Sherman Fairchild Fellowship at Caltech, by NSERC, by le Fonds de recherche du Québec—Nature et technologies (FRQNT), by McGill Space Institute, and by the William Dawson Scholarship from McGill University. J.R.F. acknowledges support by a Mitacs Research Training Award, a McGill Space Institute (MSI) Fellowship, and thanks the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder, for hospitality. Support for PFH was provided by NSF Research Grants 1911233, 20009234, 2108318, NSF CAREER grant 1455342, NASA grants 80NSSC18K0562, HST-AR-15800. This research was enabled in part by support provided by Calcul Québec (calculquebec.ca) and Compute Canada (www.computecanada.ca).

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023