The outcome of protoplanetary dust growth: pebbles, boulders, or planetesimals? II. Introducing the bouncing barrier

TL;DR

This study models dust aggregate collisions in protoplanetary disks, revealing bouncing as the main growth barrier, limiting particle size to about 1 gram, and suggesting planetesimal formation via turbulent concentration of these particles.

Contribution

It introduces a collision model based on laboratory experiments showing bouncing dominates growth barriers, preventing fragmentation and leading to a size limit in dust coagulation.

Findings

Bouncing, not fragmentation, halts dust growth.

Maximum particle size is about 1 gram.

Growth is insensitive to gas density and turbulence variations.

Abstract

The sticking of micron sized dust particles due to surface forces in circumstellar disks is the first stage in the production of asteroids and planets. The key ingredients that drive this process are the relative velocity between the dust particles in this environment and the complex physics of dust aggregate collisions. Here we present the results of a collision model, which is based on laboratory experiments of these aggregates. We investigate the maximum aggregate size and mass that can be reached by coagulation in protoplanetary disks. We model the growth of dust aggregates at 1 AU at the midplane at three different gas densities. We find that the evolution of the dust does not follow the previously assumed growth-fragmentation cycles. Catastrophic fragmentation hardly occurs in the three disk models. Furthermore we see long lived, quasi-steady states in the distribution function of the aggregates due to bouncing. We explore how the mass and the porosity change upon varying the turbulence parameter and by varying the critical mass ratio of dust particles. Particles reach Stokes numbers of roughly 10^-4 during the simulations. The particle growth is stopped by bouncing rather than fragmentation in these models. The final Stokes number of the aggregates is rather insensitive to the variations of the gas density and the strength of turbulence. The maximum mass of the particles is limited to approximately 1 gram (chondrule-sized particles). Planetesimal formation can proceed via the turbulent concentration of these aerodynamically size-sorted chondrule-sized particles.