How dust fragmentation may be beneficial to planetary growth by pebble accretion

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dust fragmentation influences pebble sizes and flux in protoplanetary disks, revealing that fragmentation can enhance planetary growth by maintaining a steady supply of small pebbles and preventing inefficient large pebble formation.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate pebble sizes and flux from dust coagulation models, highlighting the beneficial role of dust fragmentation in planetary core growth.

Findings

Dust fragmentation prevents overly large pebble formation.

Small pebbles are depleted more slowly, sustaining flux.

A simple estimation method for pebble flux and size is proposed.

Abstract

Pebble accretion is an emerging paradigm for the fast growth of planetary cores. Pebble flux and pebble sizes are the key parameters used in the pebble accretion models. We aim to derive the pebble sizes and fluxes from state-of-the-art dust coagulation models, understand their dependence on disk parameters and the fragmentation threshold velocity, and the impact of those on the planetary growth by pebble accretion. We use a one-dimensional dust evolution model including dust growth and fragmentation to calculate realistic pebble sizes and mass flux. We use this information to integrate the growth of planetary embryos placed at various locations in the protoplanetary disk. Pebble flux strongly depends on disk properties, such as its size and turbulence level, as well as on the dust aggregates fragmentation threshold. We find that dust fragmentation may be beneficial to planetary growth in multiple ways. First of all, it prevents the solids from growing to very large sizes, for which the efficiency of pebble accretion drops. What is more, small pebbles are depleted at a slower rate, providing a long-lasting pebble flux. As the full coagulation models are computationally expensive, we provide a simple method of estimating pebble sizes and flux in any protoplanetary disk model without substructure and with any fragmentation threshold velocity.