The Gravitational instability of solids assisted by gas drag: slowing by turbulent mass diffusivity

Abstract

The Goldreich and Ward (1973) (axisymmetric) gravitational instability of a razor thin particle layer occurs when the Toomre parameter $Q_T\equiv c_p{\Omega }_0/\pi G{\Sigma }_p<1$ ($c_p$ being the particle dispersion velocity). Ward(1976,2000) extended this analysis by adding the effect of gas drag upon particles and found that even when $Q_T>1$, sufficiently long waves were always unstable. Youdin (2005a,b) carried out a detailed analysis and showed that the instability allows chondrule-sized ($\sim 1$ mm) particles to undergo radial clumping with reasonable growth times even in the presence of a moderate amount of turbulent stirring. The analysis of Youdin includes the role of turbulence in setting the thickness of the dust layer and in creating a turbulent particle pressure in the momentum equation. However, he ignores the effect of turbulent mass diffusivity on the disturbance wave. Here we show that including this effect reduces the growth-rate significantly, by an amount that depends on the level of turbulence, and reduces the maximum intensity of turbulence the instability can withstand by 1 to 3 orders of magnitude. The instability is viable only when turbulence is extremely weak and the solid to gas surface density of the particle layer is considerably enhanced over minimum-mass-nebula values. A simple mechanistic explanation of the instability shows how the azimuthal component of drag promotes instability while the radial component hinders it. A gravito-diffusive overstability is also possible but never realized in the nebula models.

Accepted, June 14, 2011, Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (2)

• Particle Stirring in Turbulent Gas Disks: Including Orbital Oscillations
• On the Formation of Planetesimals via Secular Gravitational Instabilities with Turbulent Stirring

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