Azimuthal and Vertical Streaming Instability at High Dust-to-gas Ratios and on the Scales of Planetesimal Formation

TL;DR

This study investigates the streaming instability and a newly identified azimuthal streaming instability at high dust-to-gas ratios, revealing their properties and implications for planetesimal formation without self-gravity.

Contribution

It introduces the azimuthal streaming instability (aSI), explores its behavior at high dust-to-gas ratios, and emphasizes the importance of resolving these instabilities in planetesimal formation models.

Findings

SI activity persists at very high dust-to-gas ratios.

The aSI operates in the radial-azimuthal plane even when vertical modes are suppressed.

Diffusivity decreases with increasing dust-to-gas ratio, roughly following a psilon^{-1} relation.

Abstract

The collapse of dust particle clouds directly to km-sized planetesimals is a promising way to explain the formation of planetesimals, asteroids and comets. In the past, this collapse has been studied in stratified shearing box simulations with super-solar dust-to-gas ratio \epsilon, allowing for streaming instability (SI) and gravitational collapse. This paper studies the non-stratified SI under dust-to-gas ratios from \epsilon=0.1 up to \epsilon=1000 without self-gravity. The study covers domain sizes of L=0.1 H, 0.01 H and 0.001 H, in terms of gas disk scale height H, using the PencilCode. They are performed in radial-azimuthal (2-d) and radial-vertical (2.5-d) extent. The used particles of St=0.01 and 0.1 mark the upper end of the expected dust growth. SI-activity is found up to very high dust-to-gas ratios, providing fluctuations in the local dust-to-gas ratios and turbulent particle diffusion \delta. We find an SI-like instability that operates in r-\varphi even when vertical modes are suppressed. This new azimuthal streaming instability (aSI) shows similar properties and appearance as the SI. Both, SI and aSI, show diffusivity at \epsilon=100 only to be two orders of magnitude lower than at \epsilon=1, suggesting a \delta ~ \epsilon^{-1} relation that is shallow around \epsilon = 1. The (a)SI ability to concentrate particles is found to be uncorrelated with its strength in particle turbulence. Finally, we performed a resolution study to test our findings of the aSI. This paper stresses out the importance of properly resolving the (a)SI at high dust-to-gas ratios and planetesimal collapse simulations, leading else wise to potentially incomplete results.