2024/09/23 by Alexandros Ziampras, Ziampras, Alexandros, Prakruti Sudarshan +11 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astro and Planetary Science #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences #Space Exploration and Technology
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.15420
openalex publication_date 2024/09/23 · openalex created_date 2024/10/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Protoplanetary disks exhibit a rich variety of substructure in millimeter continuum emission, often attributed to unseen planets. As these planets carve gaps in the gas, dust particles can accumulate in the resulting pressure bumps, forming bright features in the dust continuum. We investigate the role of dust dynamics in the gap-opening process with 2D radiation hydrodynamics simulations of planet--disk interaction and a two-population dust component modeled as a pressureless fluid. We consider the opacity feedback and backreaction due to drag forces as mm grains accumulate in pressure bumps at different stages of dust growth. We find that dust dynamics can significantly affect the resulting substructure driven by the quasi-thermal-mass planet with Mp/M_⋆=10-4. Opacity feedback causes nonaxisymmetric features to become more compact in azimuth, whereas the drag-induced backreaction tends to dissolve nonaxisymmetries. For our fiducial model, this results in multiple concentric rings of dust rather than the expected vortices and corotating dust clumps found in models without dust feedback. A higher coagulation fraction disproportionately enhances the effect of dust opacity feedback, favoring the formation of crescents rather than rings. Our results suggest that turbulent diffusion is not always necessary to explain the rarity of observed nonaxisymmetric features, and that incorporating dust dynamics is vital for interpreting the observed substructure in protoplanetary disks. We also describe and test the implementation of the publicly-available dust fluid module in the PLUTO code.