A Lagrangian Model for Dust Evolution in Protoplanetary Disks: Formation of Wet and Dry Planetesimals at Different Stellar Masses

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel Lagrangian model to simulate pebble growth, drift, and planetesimal formation in protoplanetary disks, emphasizing the influence of water snowline location and stellar mass on planetesimal formation efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a new Lagrangian smooth-particle method for modeling dust evolution, incorporating streaming instability and water content, and applies it across different stellar masses and disk conditions.

Findings

Planetesimals form mainly outside the water snowline during early disk stages.

Cooler disks with closer snowlines produce more planetesimals.

Low-mass stars tend to form planetesimals more efficiently.

Abstract

We introduce a new Lagrangian smooth-particle method to model the growth and drift of pebbles in protoplanetary disks. The Lagrangian nature of the model makes it especially suited to follow characteristics of individual (groups of) particles, such as their composition. In this work we focus on the water content of solid particles. Planetesimal formation via streaming instability is taken into account, partly based on previous results on streaming instability outside the water snowline that were presented in Schoonenberg & Ormel (2017). We validate our model by reproducing earlier results from the literature and apply our model to steady-state viscous gas disks (with constant gas accretion rate) around stars with different masses. We also present various other models where we explore the effects of pebble accretion, the fragmentation velocity threshold, the global metallicity of the disk, and a time-dependent gas accretion rate. We find that planetesimals preferentially form in a local annulus outside the water snowline, at early times in the lifetime of the disk ($\lesssim$$10^{5} \: \rm{yr}$), when the pebble mass fluxes are high enough to trigger the streaming instability. During this first phase in the planet formation process, the snowline location hardly changes due to slow viscous evolution, and we conclude that assuming a constant gas accretion rate is justified in this first stage. The efficiency of converting the solids reservoir of the disk to planetesimals depends on the location of the water snowline. Cooler disks with a closer-in water snowline are more efficient at producing planetesimals than hotter disks where the water snowline is located further away from the star. Therefore, low-mass stars tend to form planetesimals more efficiently, but any correlation may be overshadowed by the spread in disk properties.