The evolution of planetesimal swarms in self-gravitating protoplanetary discs

TL;DR

This study explores how planetesimals evolve dynamically in self-gravitating protoplanetary discs, revealing rapid eccentricity growth and predominantly destructive collisions that influence their distribution and growth potential.

Contribution

It combines SPH simulations with Monte Carlo experiments to analyze planetesimal dynamics during the self-gravitating phase of protoplanetary discs, providing new insights into their evolution.

Findings

Planetesimal eccentricities increase rapidly to > 0.1 within self-gravitating timescales.

High velocity dispersions lead to destructive collisions rather than growth.

Most planetesimals remain at large radii despite scattering effects.

Abstract

We investigate the kinematic evolution of planetesimals in self-gravitating discs, combining Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamical (SPH) simulations of the disc gas with a gravitationally coupled population of test particle planetesimals. We find that at radii of 10s of au (which is where we expect planetesimals to be possibly formed in such discs) the planetesimals' eccentricities are rapidly pumped to values $>$ 0.1 within the timescales for which the disc is in the self-gravitating regime. The high resulting velocity dispersion and the lack of planetesimal concentration in the spiral arms means that the collision timescale is very long and that the effect of those collisions that do occur is destructive rather than leading to further planetesimal growth. We also use the SPH simulations to calibrate Monte Carlo dynamical experiments: these can be used to evolve the system over long timescales and can be compared with analytical solutions of the diffusion equation in particle angular momentum space. We find that if planetesimals are only formed in a belt at large radius then there is significant scattering of objects to small radii; nevertheless the majority of planetesimals remain at large radii. If planetesimals indeed form at early evolutionary stages, when the disc is strongly self-gravitating, then the results of this study constrain their spatial and kinematic distribution at the end of the self-gravitating phase.