The role of pebble fragmentation in planetesimal formation I. Experimental study

TL;DR

This study experimentally investigates dust-aggregate collisions at velocities relevant to planetesimal formation, providing a collision model that accounts for fragmentation and mass transfer to improve understanding of planetesimal formation processes.

Contribution

It offers new experimental data and a collision model for dust aggregate fragmentation and mass transfer during planetesimal formation, addressing a key phase in protoplanetary disk evolution.

Findings

Largest fragment mass depends on collision velocity and size ratio.

Fragment size distribution varies with collision parameters.

Mass transfer efficiency is quantified across different collision scenarios.

Abstract

Previous work on protoplanetary dust growth shows halt at centimeter sizes owing to the occurrence of bouncing at velocities of $\geq$ 0.1 $ms^{-1}$ and fragmentation at velocities $\geq$ 1 $ms^{-1}$. To overcome these barriers, spatial concentration of cm-sized dust pebbles and subsequent gravitational collapse have been proposed. However, numerical investigations have shown that dust aggregates may undergo fragmentation during the gravitational collapse phase. This fragmentation in turn changes the size distribution of the solids and thus must be taken into account in order to understand the properties of the planetesimals that form. To explore the fate of dust pebbles undergoing fragmenting collisions, we conducted laboratory experiments on dust-aggregate collisions with a focus on establishing a collision model for this stage of planetesimal formation. In our experiments, we analysed collisions of dust aggregates with masses between 1.4 g and 180 g, mass ratios between target and projectile from 125 to 1 at a fixed porosity of 65%, within the velocity range of 1.5 $-$ 8.7 $ms^{-1}$ , at low atmospheric pressure of $\sim 10^{-3}$ mbar and in free-fall conditions. We derived the mass of the largest fragment, the fragment size/mass distribution, and the efficiency of mass transfer as a function of collision velocity and projectile/target aggregate size. Moreover, we give recipes for an easy-to-use fragmentation and mass-transfer model for further use in modeling work. In a companion paper, we utilize the experimental findings and the derived dust-aggregate collision model to investigate the fate of dust pebbles during gravitational collapse.