A Pathway for Collisional Planetesimal Growth in the Ice-dominant Regions of Protoplanetary Disks

Abstract

We present a semi-analytic model for the growth, drift, desorption, and fragmentation of millimeter- to meter-sized particles in protoplanetary disks. Fragmentation occurs where particle collision velocities exceed critical fragmentation velocities. Using this criterion, we produce fragmentation regions in disk orbital radius–particle size phase space for particles with a range of material properties, structures, and compositions (including SiO2, Mg2SiO4, H2O, CO2, and CO). For reasonable disk conditions, compact aggregate H2O, CO2, and CO ice particles do not reach destructive relative velocities and are thus not likely to undergo collisional fragmentation. Uncoated silicate particles are more susceptible to collisional destruction and are expected to fragment in the inner disk, consistent with previous work. We then calculate the growth, drift, and sublimation of small particles, initially located in the outer disk. We find that ice-coated particles can avoid fragmentation as they grow and drift inward under a substantial range of disk conditions, as long as the particles are aggregates composed of 0.1 μm-sized monomers. Such particles may undergo runaway growth in disk regions abundant in H2O or CO2 ice, depending on the assumed disk temperature structure. These results indicate that icy collisional growth to planetesimally relevant sizes may happen efficiently throughout a disk’s lifetime, and is particularly robust at early times when the disk’s dust-to-gas ratio is comparable to that of the interstellar medium.