2025/12/06 by Bate, Matthew R., Hutchison, Mark A., Elsender, Daniel
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.06409
openalex publication_date 2025/12/06 · openalex created_date 2025/12/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Planet formation in the discs around young stars involves the coagulation of sub-micron sized dust grains into much larger grains that may be mixed by turbulence and migrate through the disc. In this paper, we describe how we have combined a method for modelling the coagulation of a population of dust grains with the MULTIGRAIN algorithm for modelling the dynamical evolution of a population of dust grains that are subject to strong gas drag. We solve the dynamical evolution of the dust grains due to gas drag using a recently-developed implicit integration method, and we introduce a new implicit method to model the diffusion of the dust due to unresolved hydrodynamic turbulence. The resulting smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code allows us, for the first time, to model the growth, mixing and migration of dust grain populations during the early stages of star formation and the formation, growth and evolution of a young protoplanetary disc using three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations. In doing so, we find that including turbulent dust diffusion within the disc provides a substantial enhancement of the rate of dust grain growth due to the fact that the turbulent diffusion provides a source of small and intermediate dust grains to the regions in which the largest dust grains are growing.