Abstract
Abstract High spatial resolution observations of protoplanetary disks by ALMA have revealed many substructures that are providing interesting constraints on disk physics as well as dust dynamics, both of which are essential for understanding planet formation. We carry out high-resolution, 2D global hydrodynamic simulations, including the effects of dust feedback, to study the stability of dusty rings. When the ring edges are relatively sharp and the dust surface density becomes comparable to the gas surface density, we find that dust feedback enhances the radial gradients of both the azimuthal velocity profile and the potential vorticity profile at the ring edges. This eventually leads to instabilities on meso-scales (spatial scales of several disk scale heights), causing dusty rings to be populated with many compact regions with highly concentrated dust densities. We also produce synthetic dust emission images using our simulation results and discuss the comparison between simulations and observations.
Highlights
Over the past few years, observations obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed small scale structures in the distribution ofmillimeter dust grains around many circumstellar disks surrounding nearby young stars
When the ring edges are relatively sharp and the dust surface density becomes comparable to the gas surface density, we find that dust feedback enhances the radial gradients of both the azimuthal velocity profile and the potential vorticity profile at the ring edges
This eventually leads to instabilities on meso-scales, causing dusty rings to be populated with many compact regions with highly concentrated dust densities on meso-scales
Summary
Over the past few years, observations obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed small scale structures in the distribution of (sub)millimeter dust grains around many circumstellar disks surrounding nearby young stars. The majority of the millimeter bright disks observed so far feature multiple rings and gaps characterized by radii spanning from a few to a few hundreds of astronomical units (au) (Brogan et al 2015; Andrews et al 2016; Isella et al 2016; Andrews et al 2018a; Huang et al 2018a; Fedele et al 2018; Perez et al 2018a; Andrews et al 2018b; Huang et al 2018b; Guzman et al 2018; Dullemond et al 2018; Isella et al 2018), while a smaller fraction of objects show prominent dust crescents (Fujiwara et al 2006; Isella et al 2010, 2013; van der Marel et al 2013; Perez et al 2014; van der Marel et al 2016; Boehler et al 2017; Benisty et al 2018; Cazzoletti et al 2018; Perez et al 2018b; Boehler et al 2018) and spiral arms (Grady et al 2012; Benisty et al 2015; Akiyama et al 2016; Boehler et al 2018; Dong et al 2018b; Huang et al 2018c; Uyama et al 2018) The origin of these structures is debated but it is common understanding that they might carry key information about the formation of planets. This scenario does not seem to be consistent with the rather random distribution of rings radii (Huang et al 2018a; Long et al 2018)
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