[en] It is shown that the protoplanetary dust condensations around the T-Tauri star RU Lup, proposed by Gahm et al. (1974), would be unstable to tidal disruption if they are bound only by gravitational forces. There are extreme conditions under which the condensations would be stable, but such conditions would easily be verifiable observationally. (orig.)

[en] One of the first stages of planet formation is the growth of small planetesimals and their accumulation into large planetesimals and planetary embryos. This early stage occurs much before the dispersal of most of the gas from the protoplanetary disk. Due to their different aerodynamic properties, planetesimals of different sizes and shapes experience different drag forces from the gas during this time. Such differential forces produce a wind-shearing (WISH) effect between close by, different-sized planetesimals. For any two planetesimals, a WISH radius can be considered at which the differential acceleration due to the wind becomes greater than the mutual gravitational pull between the planetesimals. We find that the WISH radius could be much smaller than the gravitational shearing radius by the star (the Hill radius). In other words, during the gas-phase of the disk, WISH could play a more important role than tidal perturbations by the star. Here, we study the WISH radii for planetesimal pairs of different sizes and compare the effects of wind and gravitational shearing (drag force versus gravitational tidal force). We then discuss the role of WISH for the stability and survival of binary planetesimals. Binaries are sheared apart by the wind if they are wider than their WISH radius. WISH-stable binaries can also inspiral, and possibly coalesce, due to gas drag. Here, we calculate the WISH radius and the gas-drag-induced merger timescale, providing stability and survival criteria for gas-embedded binary planetesimals. Our results suggest that even WISH-stable binaries may merge in times shorter than the lifetime of the gaseous disk. This may constrain currently observed binary planetesimals to have formed far from the star or at a late stage after the dispersal of most of the disk gas. We note that the WISH radius may also be important for other processes such as planetesimal erosion and planetesimal encounters and collisions in a gaseous environment.

[en] The origin of crystalline grains in comets and the outer regions of protoplanetary disks remains a mystery. It has been suggested that such grains form via annealing of amorphous precursors in the hot, inner region of a protoplanetary disk, where the temperatures needed for such transformations were found, and were then transported outward by some dynamical means. Here we develop a means of tracking the paths that dust grains would have taken through a diffusive protoplanetary disk and examine the types and ranges of environments that particles would have seen over a 10⁶ yr time period in the dynamic disk. We then combine this model with three annealing laws to examine how the dynamic evolution of amorphous grains would have led to their physical restructuring and their delivery to various regions of the disk. It is found that 'sibling particles' - those particles that reside at the same location at a given period of time-take a wide range of unique and independent paths through the disk to arrive there. While high temperatures can persist in the disk for very long time periods, we find that those grains that are delivered to the cold outer regions of the disk are largely annealed in the first few x10⁵ yr of disk history. This suggests that the crystallinity of grains in the outer disk would be determined early and remain unchanged for much of disk history, in agreement with recent astronomical observations.

[en] We present new Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) continuum observations at 7 mm of the 253-1536 binary disk system in the Orion Nebula Cluster. The measured fluxes were combined with data in the submillimeter to derive the millimeter spectral index of each individual disk component. We show how these observations can be used to test the models of dust evolution and early growth of solids in protoplanetary disks. Our analysis indicates that the disk with lower density and higher temperature hosts larger grains than the companion disk. This result is the opposite of what is predicted by the dust evolution models. The models and observational results can be reconciled if the viscosity α-parameter differs by more than a factor of 10 in the two disks, or if the distribution of solids in the disks is strongly affected by radial motions. This analysis can be applied to future high angular resolution observations of young disks with EVLA and ALMA to provide even stronger observational constraints to the models of dust evolution in protoplanetary disks.

[en] After a decade rich in giant exoplanet detections, observation techniques have now reached the sensitivity to gain information on the physical structure and chemical content of some of the detected planets and also to find planets of less than 10 M₊. The detection and characterization of Earth-like planets is approaching rapidly and dedicated space observatories are already in operation (CoRoT) or in the development phase (Kepler, Darwin and TPF-I/C). In this paper, we explore the domain of terrestrial planets, emphasizing habitable worlds. We discuss the possibility of performing a spectral characterization of their properties using the next generation of astronomical instruments

[en] Small (sub)micron dust is present over the entire lifetime of protoplanetary disks. As aggregation readily depletes small particles, one explanation might be that dust is continuously generated by larger bodies in the midplane and transported to the surface of the disks. In general, in a first step of this scenario, the larger bodies have to be destroyed again and different mechanisms exist with the potential to accomplish this. Possible destructive mechanisms are fragmentation in collisions, erosion by gas drag, or light-induced erosion. In laboratory experiments, we find that the latter, light-induced erosion by Knudsen compression and photophoresis can provide small particles. It might be a preferred candidate, as the dust is released into a low particle density region. The working principle of this mechanism prevents or decreases the likelihood for instant re-accretion or re-growth of large dense aggregates. Provided that there is a particle lift, e.g., turbulence, these particles might readily reach the surface of the disk.

[en] The IRAS star β Pictoris is still the only one around which a disk made of both dust and gas has been detected. Spectroscopic observations of β Pic have revealed that some metallic absorption lines present redshifted additional components which strongly variate with time. This has been interpreted as the result of the infall of small evaporating cometary-like bodies toward the star. To improve this model, a theoretical description of such an event has been purchased. Numerical simulations of such infalling bodies have been able to reproduce quite faithfully the observed behaviour of some metallic ions, and we have explained the observed difference between these behaviours by means of radiation pressure. Some constraints on the orbits of the bodies have been deduced by through the simulations which should be related to a possible interpretation concerning β Pic's disk

[en] Runaway growth is an important stage in planet formation during which large protoplanets form, while most of the initial mass remains in small planetesimals. The amount of mass converted into large protoplanets and their resulting size distribution are not well understood. Here, we use analytic work, that we confirm by coagulation simulations, to describe runaway growth and the corresponding evolution of the velocity dispersion. We find that runaway growth proceeds as follows. Initially, all the mass resides in small planetesimals, with mass surface density σ, and large protoplanets start to form by accreting small planetesimals. This growth continues until growth by merging large protoplanets becomes comparable to growth by planetesimal accretion. This condition sets in when Σ/σ ∼ α^3/4 ∼ 10^-3, where Σ is the mass surface density in protoplanets in a given logarithmic mass interval and α is the ratio of the size of a body to its Hill radius. From then on, protoplanetary growth and the evolution of the velocity dispersion become self-similar and Σ remains roughly constant, since an increase in Σ by accretion of small planetesimals is balanced by a decrease due to merging with large protoplanets. We show that this growth leads to a protoplanet size distribution given by N(>R) ∝ R^-3, where N(>R) is the number of objects with radii greater than R (i.e., a differential power-law index of 4). Since only the largest bodies grow significantly during runaway growth, Σ and thereby the size distribution are preserved. We apply our results to the Kuiper Belt, which is a relic of runaway growth where planet formation never proceeded to completion. Our results successfully match the observed Kuiper Belt size distribution, they illuminate the physical processes that shaped it and explain the total mass that is present in large Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) today. This work suggests that the current mass in large KBOs is primordial and that it has not been significantly depleted. We also predict a maximum mass ratio for Kuiper Belt binaries that formed by dynamical processes of α^-1/4 ∼ 10, which explains the observed clustering in binary companion sizes that is seen in the cold classical belt. Finally, our results also apply to growth in debris disks, as long as frequent planetesimal-planetesimal collisions are not important during the growth.

[en] The chemical and physical evolution of primitive materials in protoplanetary disks are determined by the types of environments they are exposed to and their residence times within each environment. Here, a method for calculating representative paths of materials in diffusive protoplanetary disks is developed and applied to understanding how the vertical trajectories that particles take impact their overall evolution. The methods are general enough to be applied to disks with uniform diffusivity, the so-called constant-α cases, and disks with a spatially varying diffusivity, such as expected in 'layered-disks'. The average long-term dynamical evolution of small particles and gaseous molecules is independent of the specific form of the diffusivity in that they spend comparable fractions of their lifetimes at different heights in the disk. However, the paths that individual particles and molecules take depend strongly on the form of the diffusivity leading to a different range of behavior of particles in terms of deviations from the mean. As temperatures, gas densities, chemical abundances, and photon fluxes will vary with height in protoplanetary disks, the different paths taken by primitive materials will lead to differences in their chemical and physical evolution. Examples of differences in gas phase chemistry and photochemistry are explored here. The methods outlined here provide a powerful tool that can be integrated with chemical models to understand the formation and evolution of primitive materials in protoplanetary disks on timescales of 10⁵-10⁶ years.

[en] With an emphasis on improving the fidelity even in super-resolution regimes, new imaging techniques have been intensively developed over the last several years, which may provide substantial improvements to the interferometric observation of protoplanetary disks. In this study, sparse modeling (SpM) is applied for the first time to observational data sets taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The two data sets used in this study were taken independently using different array configurations at Band 7 (330 GHz), targeting the protoplanetary disk around HD 142527: one in the shorter-baseline array configuration (∼430 m), and the other in the longer-baseline array configuration (∼1570 m). The image resolutions reconstructed from the two data sets are different by a factor of ∼3. We confirm that the previously known disk structures appear on the images produced by both SpM and CLEAN at the standard beam size. The image reconstructed from the shorter-baseline data using the SpM matches that obtained with the longer-baseline data using the CLEAN, achieving a super-resolution image from which a structure finer than the beam size can be reproduced. Our results demonstrate that ongoing intensive development in the SpM imaging technique is beneficial to imaging with ALMA.