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      Instabilities and Flow Structures in Protoplanetary Disks: Setting the Stage for Planetesimal Formation

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          Abstract

          This chapter highlights the properties of turbulence and meso-scale flow structures in protoplanetary disks and their role in the planet formation process. Here we focus on the formation of planetesimals from a gravitational collapse of a pebble cloud. Large scale and long lived flow structures - vortices and zonal flows - are a consequence of weak magneto and hydrodynamic instabilities in the pressure and entropy stratified quasi-Keplerian shear flow interacting with the fast rotation of the disk. The vortices and zonal flows on the other hand are particle traps tapping into the radial pebble flux of the disk, leading to locally sufficient accumulations to trigger gravitational collapse, directly converting pebbles to many kilometer sized planetesimals. This collapse is moderated by the streaming instability, which is a back-reaction from the particle accumulations onto the gas flow. Without trapping pebbles and increasing thus the local solid to gas ratio, this back-reaction would ultimately prevent the formation of planetsimals via turbulent diffusion. The formation of long lived flow structures is therefore a necessary condition for an efficient and fast formation of planetesimals.

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          Rapid planetesimal formation in turbulent circumstellar discs

          The initial stages of planet formation in circumstellar gas discs proceed via dust grains that collide and build up larger and larger bodies (Safronov 1969). How this process continues from metre-sized boulders to kilometre-scale planetesimals is a major unsolved problem (Dominik et al. 2007): boulders stick together poorly (Benz 2000), and spiral into the protostar in a few hundred orbits due to a head wind from the slower rotating gas (Weidenschilling 1977). Gravitational collapse of the solid component has been suggested to overcome this barrier (Safronov 1969, Goldreich & Ward 1973, Youdin & Shu 2002). Even low levels of turbulence, however, inhibit sedimentation of solids to a sufficiently dense midplane layer (Weidenschilling & Cuzzi 1993, Dominik et al. 2007), but turbulence must be present to explain observed gas accretion in protostellar discs (Hartmann 1998). Here we report the discovery of efficient gravitational collapse of boulders in locally overdense regions in the midplane. The boulders concentrate initially in transient high pressures in the turbulent gas (Johansen, Klahr, & Henning 2006), and these concentrations are augmented a further order of magnitude by a streaming instability (Youdin & Goodman 2005, Johansen, Henning, & Klahr 2006, Johansen & Youdin 2007) driven by the relative flow of gas and solids. We find that gravitationally bound clusters form with masses comparable to dwarf planets and containing a distribution of boulder sizes. Gravitational collapse happens much faster than radial drift, offering a possible path to planetesimal formation in accreting circumstellar discs.
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            Aerodynamics of solid bodies in the solar nebula

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              Accretion Discs in Astrophysics

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                11 June 2018
                Article
                1806.03896
                1071a82c-719e-4459-b09e-b8215b7b8398

                http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

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                Custom metadata
                Preprint of a particle that is supposed to be part of the 'Handbook of Exoplanets'
                astro-ph.EP

                Planetary astrophysics
                Planetary astrophysics

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