Low-velocity collisions of centimeter-sized dust aggregates

TL;DR

This study experimentally investigates low-velocity collisions of centimeter-sized dust aggregates, revealing lower fragmentation thresholds and insights into bouncing, fragmentation, and mass transfer relevant to planetesimal formation.

Contribution

It provides new experimental data on collision outcomes, including a lower fragmentation velocity and critical energy, enhancing understanding of dust evolution in protoplanetary disks.

Findings

Fragmentation velocity found to be 20 cm/s, lower than previous estimates.

Critical energy for disruption is at least two orders of magnitude lower.

Mass transfer occurs with an accretion efficiency of a few percent.

Abstract

Collisions between centimeter- to decimeter-sized dusty bodies are important to understand the mechanisms leading to the formation of planetesimals. We thus performed laboratory experiments to study the collisional behavior of dust aggregates in this size range at velocities below and around the fragmentation threshold. We developed two independent experimental setups with the same goal to study the effects of bouncing, fragmentation, and mass transfer in free particle-particle collisions. The first setup is an evacuated drop tower with a free-fall height of 1.5 m, providing us with 0.56 s of microgravity time so that we observed collisions with velocities between 8 mm/s and 2 m/s. The second setup is designed to study the effect of partial fragmentation (when only one of the two aggregates is destroyed) and mass transfer in more detail. It allows for the measurement of the accretion efficiency as the samples are safely recovered after the encounter. Our results are that for very low velocities we found bouncing as could be expected while the fragmentation velocity of 20 cm/s was significantly lower than expected. We present the critical energy for disruptive collisions Q*, which showed up to be at least two orders of magnitude lower than previous experiments in the literature. In the wide range between bouncing and disruptive collisions, only one of the samples fragmented in the encounter while the other gained mass. The accretion efficiency in the order of a few percent of the particle's mass is depending on the impact velocity and the sample porosity. Our results will have consequences for dust evolution models in protoplanetary disks as well as for the strength of large, porous planetesimal bodies.