Abstract:
Dust is the building blocks of planets, and plays an important role in planet formation as they grow over 13 orders of magnitude in size, from micron sized dust grains to over Mm sized planets. The intermediate stage, to form km-sized planetesimals from mm-cm sized dust particles, has been found to be difficult. These mm-cm sized dust particles are revealed by ALMA dust continuum observations of protoplanetary disks, and frequently distribute in ring-like structures.
Here, I present a series of MHD simulations with the Athena code to study planetesimal formation in realistic environments, including in MRI turbulent protoplanetary disks and in turbulent dust rings. Our result shows efficient dust clumping in these realistic environments, sufficient for planetesimal formation.
I will also present some numerical efforts towards understanding dust dynamics and planet formation processes with multi-stage studies. This includes numerical implementations of dust coagulation in the Athena++ MHD code, as well as a local model for the protostellar collapse. These numerical tools pave way for tracing back planet formation to the earliest stages, bridging the persisting gap in the current understanding of planet formation.
