2019/05/15 by Rodrigo Vicente, Vitor Cardoso, Vítor Cardoso +1 · 25 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Accretion (finance) #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Classical mechanics #Drag #Dynamical friction #Galaxy #Gravitation #Gravitational potential #Mechanics #Physics #Planet #Slab #Stars #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Supersonic speed #Wake #astro-ph.GA #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnras/stz2526
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 489(4), 5424-5435 (Oxford University Press) · 10 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2019/05/15 · openalex created_date 2019/05/29 · openalex publication_date 2019/09/06 · arxiv updated 2019/09/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
ABSTRACT The evolution of planets, stars, and even galaxies is driven, to a large extent, by dynamical friction of gravitational origin. There is now a good understanding of the friction produced by extended media, either collisionless or fluid-like. However, the physics of accretion or protoplanetary discs, for instance, is described by slab-like geometries instead, compact in one spatial direction. Here, we find, for the first time, the gravitational wake due to a massive perturber moving through a slab-like medium, describing e.g. accretion discs with sharp transitions. We show that dynamical friction in such environments can be substantially reduced relatively to spatially extended profiles. Finally, we provide simple and accurate expressions for the gravitational drag force felt by the perturber, in both the subsonic and supersonic regime.