Size-selective accretion of dust on to CPDs: low CPD masses and filtration of larger grains

Abstract

ABSTRACT The major satellites of Jupiter and Saturn are believed to have formed in circumplanetary discs (CPDs), which orbit forming giant protoplanets. Gas and dust in CPDs have different distributions and affect each other by drag, which varies with grain size. Yet simulations of multiple dust grain sizes with separate dynamics have not been done before. We seek to assess how much dust of each grain size there is in CPDs. We run multifluid 3D hydrodynamical simulations including gas and four discrete grain sizes of dust from 1 μm to 1 mm, representing a continuous distribution. We consider a 1MJup protoplanet embedded in a protoplanetary disc around a 1 M⊙ star. Our results show a truncated MRN (Mathis-Rumpl-Nordsieck) distribution at smaller grain sizes, which starts to tail off by a = 100 μm and is near zero at 1 mm. Large dust grains, which hold most of the dust mass, have very inefficient accretion to the CPD, due to dust filtration. Therefore, CPDs’ dust masses must be small, with mass ratio ∼ a few × 10−6 to the protoplanet. These masses and the corresponding millimetre opacities are in line with CPD fluxes observed to date.