Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wp2c8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-07T03:09:37.789Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Linking the Origin of Asteroids to Planetesimal Formation in the Solar Nebula

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2016

Hubert Klahr
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany email: klahr@mpia.de
Andreas Schreiber
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany email: aschreiber@mpia.de
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The asteroids (more precisely: objects of the main asteroid belt) and Kuiper Belt objects (more precisely: objects of the cold classical Kuiper Belt) are leftovers of the building material for our earth and all other planets in our solar system from more than 4.5 billion years ago. At the time of their formation those were typically 100 km large objects. They were called planetesimals, built up from icy and dusty grains. In our current paradigm of planet formation it was turbulent flows and metastable flow patterns, like zonal flows and vortices, that concentrated mm to cm sized icy dust grains in sufficient numbers that a streaming instability followed by a gravitational collapse of these particle clump was triggered. The entire picture is sometimes referred to as gravoturbulent formation of planetesimals. What was missing until recently, was a physically motivated prediction on the typical sizes at which planetesimals should form via this process. Our numerical simulations in the past had only shown a correlation between numerical resolution and planetesimal size and thus no answer was possible (Johansen et al.2011). But with the lastest series of simulations on JUQUEEN (Stephan & Doctor 2015), covering all the length scales down to the physical size of actual planetesimals, we were able to obtain values for the turbulent particle diffusion as a function of the particle load in the gas. Thus, we have all necessary data at hand to feed a 'back of the envelope' calculation that predicts the size of planetesimals as result of a competition between gravitational concentration and turbulent diffusion. Using the diffusion values obtained in the numerical simulations it predicts planetesimal sizes on the order of 100 km, which suprisingly coincides with the measured data from both asteroids (Bottke et al.2005) as well from Kuiper Belt objects (Nesvorny et al.2011).

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2016 

References

Asphaug, E. & Benz, W. (1996). Size, Density, and Structure of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Inferred from the Physics of Tidal Breakup. Icarus 121, 225248CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ALMA Partnership, A., Brogan, C. L., Perez, L. M., Hunter, T. R., Dent, W. R. F., Hales, A. S., et al. (2015). The 2014 ALMA Long Baseline Campaign: First Results from High Angular Resolution Observations toward the HL Tau Region. ApJ (Letters) 808 (1), L3, http://doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/808/1/L3Google Scholar
Benisty, M., Juhasz, A., Boccaletti, A., Avenhaus, H., Milli, J., Thalmann, C., et al. (2015). Asymmetric features in the protoplanetary disk MWC 758. A&A 578, L6Google Scholar
Birnstiel, T., Klahr, H. & Ercolano, B. 2012. A simple model for the evolution of the dust population in protoplanetary disks. A&A 539, A148Google Scholar
Bottke, W. F., Durda, D. D., Nesvorny, D., Jedicke, R., Morbidelli, A., Vokrouhlicky, D., & Levison, H. F. (2005). Linking the collisional history of the main asteroid belt to its dynamical excitation and depletion. Icarus 179 (1), 6394CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dittrich, K. (2013). Numerical Simulations of Planetesimal Formation in Protoplanetary Disks. Uni Heidelberg, PhD-thesis http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/15664Google Scholar
Dittrich, K., Klahr, H., & Johansen, A. 2013. Gravoturbulent Planetesimal Formation: The Positive Effect of Long-lived Zonal Flows. ApJ (Letters) 763, 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flock, M., Ruge, J. P., Dzyurkevich, N., Henning, T., Klahr, H., & Wolf, S. 2015. Gaps, rings, and non-axisymmetric structures in protoplanetary disks. From simulations to ALMA observations. A&A 574, A68Google Scholar
Johansen, A., Klahr, H., & Henning, T. (2006). Gravoturbulent Formation of Planetesimals. ApJ 636, 11211134CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johansen, A., Oishi, J. S., Mac Low, M.-M., Klahr, H., Henning, T., & Youdin, A. (2007). Rapid planetesimal formation in turbulent circumstellar disks. Nature 448, 10221025CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johansen, A. & Youdin, A. 2007. Protoplanetary Disk Turbulence Driven by the Streaming Instability: Nonlinear Saturation and Particle Concentration. ApJ 662, 627641CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johansen, A., Klahr, H., & Henning, T. (2011). High-resolution simulations of planetesimal formation in turbulent protoplanetary discs. A&A 529, A62Google Scholar
Johansen, A., Youdin, A. N., & Lithwick, Y. 2012. Adding particle collisions to the formation of asteroids and Kuiper belt objects via streaming instabilities. A&A 537, A125.Google Scholar
Johansen, A., Mac Low, M.-M., Lacerda, P., & Bizzarro, M. 2015. Growth of asteroids, planetary embryos, and Kuiper belt objects by chondrule accretion. Science Advances 1, 1500109.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Klahr, H. H. & Bodenheimer, P. 2003. Turbulence in Accretion Disks: Vorticity Generation and Angular Momentum Transport via the Global Baroclinic Instability. ApJ 582, 869892CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nesvorny, D., Vokrouhlicky, D., Bottke, W. F., Noll, K., & Levison, H. F. (2011). Observed Binary Fraction Sets Limits on the Extent of Collisional Grinding in the Kuiper Belt. ApJ 141 (5), 159http://doi.org/10.1088/0004-6256/141/5/159CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shariff, K. & Cuzzi, J. N. 2015. The Spherically Symmetric Gravitational Collapse of a Clump of Solids in a Gas. ApJ 805, 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephan, M., Doctor, J., Jülich Supercomputing Centre. (2015). JUQUEEN: IBM Blue Gene/Q Supercomputer System at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Journal of large-scale research facilities, 1, A1. http://dx.doi.org/10.17815/jlsrf-1-18 http://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2005.05.017CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Youdin, A. & Johansen, A. 2007. Protoplanetary Disk Turbulence Driven by the Streaming Instability: Linear Evolution and Numerical Methods. ApJ 662, 613626CrossRefGoogle Scholar