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Abstract Radio images of protoplanetary disks demonstrate that dust grains tend to organize themselves into rings. These rings may be a consequence of dust trapping within gas pressure maxima, wherein the local high dust-to-gas ratio is expected to trigger the formation of planetesimals and eventually planets. We revisit the behavior of dust near gas pressure perturbations enforced by a planet in two-dimensional, shearing-box simulations. While dust grains collect into generally long-lived rings, particles with a small Stokes parameter τ s < 0.1 tend to advect out of the ring within a few drift timescales. Scaled to the properties of ALMA disks, we find that rings composed of larger particles ( τ s ≥ 0.1) can nucleate a dust clump massive enough to trigger pebble accretion, which proceeds to ingest the entire dust ring well within ∼1 Myr. To ensure the survival of the dust rings, we favor a nonplanetary origin and typical grain size τ s ≲ 0.05–0.1. Planet-driven rings may still be possible but if so we would expect the orbital distance of the dust rings to be larger for older systems.
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On the Origin of Dust Structures in Protoplanetary Disks: Constraints from the Rossby Wave Instability
Abstract High-resolution submillimeter observations of protoplanetary disks with ALMA have revealed that dust rings are common in large, bright disks. The leading explanation for these structures is dust trapping in a local gas pressure maximum, caused by an embedded planet or other dynamical process. Independent of origin, such dust traps should be stable for many orbits to collect significant dust. However, ringlike perturbations in gas disks are also known to trigger the Rossby wave instability (RWI). We investigate whether axisymmetric pressure bumps can simultaneously trap dust and remain stable to the RWI. The answer depends on the thermodynamic properties of pressure bumps. For isothermal bumps, dust traps are RWI stable for widths from ∼1 to several gas scale heights. Adiabatic dust traps are stable over a smaller range of widths. For temperature bumps with no surface density component, however, all dust traps tend to be unstable. Smaller values of disk aspect ratio allow stable dust trapping at lower bump amplitudes and over a larger range of widths. We also report a new approximate criterion for RWI. Instability occurs when the radial oscillation frequency is ≲75% of the Keplerian frequency, which differs from the well-known Lovelace necessary (but not sufficient) criterion for instability. Our results can guide ALMA observations of molecular gas by constraining the resolution and sensitivity needed to identify the pressure bumps thought to be responsible for dust rings.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2007422
- PAR ID:
- 10621851
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Astronomical Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Astrophysical Journal Letters
- Volume:
- 946
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-8205
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- L1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/acc17b
