GIANT PLANET FORMATION BY DISK INSTABILITY: A COMPARISON SIMULATION WITH AN IMPROVED RADIATIVE SCHEME
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506 (United States)
- Department of Physics, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI 54912 (United States)
There has been disagreement about whether cooling in protoplanetary disks can be sufficiently fast to induce the formation of gas giant protoplanets via gravitational instabilities. Simulations by our own group and others indicate that this method of planet formation does not work for disks around young, low-mass stars inside several tens of AU, while simulations by other groups show fragmentation into protoplanetary clumps in this region. To allow direct comparison in hopes of isolating the cause of the differences, we here present a high-resolution three-dimensional hydrodynamics simulation of a protoplanetary disk, where the disk model, initial perturbation, and simulation conditions are essentially identical to those used in a recent set of simulations by Boss in 2007, hereafter B07. As in earlier papers by the same author, B07 purports to show that cooling is fast enough to produce protoplanetary clumps. Here, we evolve the same B07 disk using an improved version of one of our own radiative schemes and find that the disk does not fragment in our code but instead quickly settles into a state with only low amplitude nonaxisymmetric structure, which persists for at least several outer disk rotations. We see no rapid radiative or convective cooling. We conclude that the differences in results are due to different treatments of regions at and above the disk photosphere, and we explain at least one way in which the scheme in B07 may lead to artificially fast cooling.
- OSTI ID:
- 21451072
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 716, Issue 2; Other Information: DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/716/2/L176; ISSN 2041-8205
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
ACCRETION DISKS
GRAVITATIONAL INSTABILITY
HYDRODYNAMICS
PERTURBATION THEORY
PHOTOSPHERE
PLANETS
PROTOPLANETS
ROTATION
SATELLITES
STARS
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS
ATMOSPHERES
FLUID MECHANICS
INSTABILITY
MECHANICS
MOTION
PLASMA INSTABILITY
SOLAR ATMOSPHERE
STELLAR ATMOSPHERES