On the Feeding Zone of Planetesimal Formation by the Streaming Instability

Abstract

The streaming instability is a promising mechanism to overcome the barriers in direct dust growth and lead to the formation of planetesimals. Most previous studies of the streaming instability, however, were focused on a local region of a protoplanetary disk with a limited simulation domain such that only one filamentary concentration of solids has been observed. The characteristic separation between filaments is therefore not known. To address this, we conduct the largest-scale simulations of the streaming instability to date, with computational domains up to 1.6 gas scale heights both horizontally and vertically. The large dynamical range allows the effect of vertical gas stratification to become prominent. We observe more frequent merging and splitting of filaments in simulation boxes of high vertical extent. We find multiple filamentary concentrations of solids with an average separation of about 0.2 local gas scale heights, much higher than the most unstable wavelength from linear stability analysis. This measures the characteristic separation of planetesimal forming events driven by the streaming instability and thus the initial feeding zone of planetesimals.

AASTeX preprint, 21 pages, including 7 figures. Accepted by ApJ

References in corpus (3)

• Turbulent Torques on Protoplanets in a Dead Zone
• Vertical Shearing Instabilities in Radially Shearing Disks: The Dustiest Layers of the Protoplanetary Nebula
• Multifluid simulations of the Magnetorotational Instability in protostellar disks

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• Streaming Instability with Multiple Dust Species: II. Turbulence and Dust-Gas Dynamics at Nonlinear Saturation
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• The coexistence of the streaming instability and the vertical shear instability in protoplanetary disks: Planetesimal formation thresholds explored in two-dimensional global models
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• Streaming instability on different scales. I. Planetesimal mass distribution variability
• The effect of the streaming instability on protoplanetary disc emission at millimetre wavelengths
• Nonlinear evolution of streaming instabilities in accreting protoplanetary disks
• Evolution of $\alpha$ Centauri B's protoplanetary disc
• Seeing the unseen: a method to detect unresolved rings in protoplanetary disks
• RW Aur A : SpeX Spectral Evidence for Differentiated Planetesimal Formation, Migration and Destruction in an 3 Myr Old Excited CTTS System
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• Explosive instability of dust settling in a protoplanetary disc