Protostellar collapse: the conditions to form dust rich protoplanetary disks

TL;DR

This study investigates dust-gas decoupling during protostellar collapse using simulations, revealing how dust concentration depends on initial cloud properties and grain sizes, impacting disk formation and composition.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed dust dynamics model in collapse simulations, showing how dust decouples from gas based on initial conditions and grain sizes, which was previously underexplored.

Findings

Dust of ~10 microns size decouples significantly from gas.

Dust-to-gas ratios can increase several times in dense regions.

Decoupling depends on initial cloud properties and magnetic fields.

Abstract

Dust plays a key role during star, disk and planet formation. Yet, its dynamics during the protostellar collapse remains a poorly investigated field. Recent studies seem to indicate that dust may decouple efficiently from the gas during these early stages. We aim to understand how much and in which regions dust grains concentrate during the early phases of the protostellar collapse, and see how it depends on the properties of the initial cloud and of the solid particles. We use the multiple species dust dynamics solver of the grid-based code RAMSES to perform various simulations of dusty collapses. We perform hydrodynamical and MHD simulations where we vary the maximum grain size, the thermal-to-gravitational energy ratio and the magnetic properties of the cloud. We simulate the simultaneous evolution of ten neutral dust grains species with grain sizes varying from a few nm to a few hundredth of microns. We obtain a significant decoupling between the gas and the dust for grains of typical sizes a few 10 microns. This decoupling strongly depends on the thermal-to-gravitational energy ratio, the grain sizes or the inclusion of a magnetic field. With a semi-analytic model calibrated on our results, we show that the dust ratio mostly varies exponentially with the initial Stokes number at a rate that depends on the local cloud properties. We find that larger grains tend to settle and drift efficiently in the first-core and in the newly formed disk. This can produce dust-to-gas ratios of several times the initial value. Dust concentrates in high density regions and is depleted in low density regions. The size at which grains decouple from the gas depends on the initial properties of the clouds. Since dust can not necessarily be used as a proxy for gas during the collapse, we emphasize on the necessity of including the treatment of its dynamics in collapse simulations.