Effect of Dust Rotational Disruption by Radiative Torques and Implications for F-corona decrease revealed by the Parker Solar Probe

Abstract

The first-year results from the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) reveal a gradual decrease of F-coronal dust from distances of $D=0.166-0.336$ AU (or the inner elongations of $\sim 9.22-18.69R_{\odot }$) to the Sun (Howard et al. 2019). Such a F-corona decrease cannot be explained by the dust sublimation scenario of the popular silicate composition that implies a dust-free-zone of boundary at heliocentric radius $R\lesssim 4-5R_{\odot }$, but may be explained by appealing to various dust compositions with different sublimation fronts. In this paper, we present an additional explanation for the F-corona decrease using our newly introduced mechanism of dust destruction so-called Radiative Torque Disruption (RATD) mechanism. We demonstrate that RATD rapidly breaks large grains into nanoparticles so that they can be efficiently destroyed by nonthermal sputtering induced by bombardment of energetic protons from slow solar winds, which extends the dust-free-zone established by thermal sublimation to $R_{dfz}\sim 8R_{\odot }$. Beyond this extended dust-free-zone, we find that the dust mass decreases gradually from $R\sim 42R_{\odot }$ toward the Sun due to partial removal of nanodust by nonthermal sputtering. The joint effect of RATD and nonthermal sputtering can successfully reproduce the gradual decrease of the F-corona between $19-9R_{\odot }$ observed by the PSP. Finally, the RATD mechanism can efficiently produce nanoparticles usually observed in the inner solar system.

14 pages, 7 figures, accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (11)

• Radiative torques: Analytical Model and Basic Properties
• Radiative torque alignment: Essential Physical Processes
• Grain Alignment by Radiative Torques in Special Conditions and Implications
• Subsonic Mechanical Alignment of Irregular Grains
• Radiative torques alignment in the presence of pinwheel torques
• Tensile Strength of Porous Dust Aggregates
• The tensile strength of dust aggregates consisting of small elastic grains: Constraints on the size of condensates in protoplanetary disks
• Alignment and rotational disruption of dust
• Radiative torques of irregular grains: Describing the alignment of a grain ensemble
• Alignment of irregular grains by radiative torques: efficiency study
• Rotational disruption of dust grains by mechanical torques for high-velocity gas-grain collisions