Dust-Gas Coupling in Turbulence- and MHD Wind-Driven Protoplanetary Disks: Implications for Rocky Planet Formation

TL;DR

This study models dust-gas coupling in protoplanetary disks under turbulence and MHD winds, revealing how different conditions influence planet formation pathways, especially the dominance of pebble accretion versus collisions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of dust particle Stokes numbers in evolving disks, highlighting the impact of disk winds and turbulence on rocky planet formation mechanisms.

Findings

Pebble accretion is slow inside the ice-line but rapid beyond it.

Pressure maxima can inhibit pebble accretion by trapping solids.

Collisional growth dominates in typical observed disk conditions.

Abstract

The degree of coupling between dust particles and their surrounding gas in protoplanetary disks is quantified by the dimensionless Stokes number. The Stokes number (St) governs particle size and spatial distributions, in turn establishing the dominant mode of planetary accretion in different disk regions. In this paper, we model the characteristic St of particles across time in disks evolving under both turbulent viscosity and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) disk winds. In both turbulence- and wind-dominated disks, we find that collisional fragmentation is the limiting mechanism of particle growth, and the water-ice sublimation line constitutes a critical transition point between dust settling, drift, and size regimes. The St dichotomy across the ice-line translates to distinct planet formation pathways between the inner and outer disk. While pebble accretion proceeds slowly for rocky embryos within the ice-line (across most of parameter space), it does so rapidly for volatile-rich embryos beyond it, allowing for the growth of giant planet cores before disk dissipation. Through simulations of rocky planet growth, we evaluate the competition between pebble accretion and classical pairwise collisions between planetesimals. We conclude that the dominance of pebble accretion can only be realized in disks that are driven by MHD winds, slow-evolving, and devoid of pressure maxima that may concentrate solids and give rise of planetesimal rings. Such disks are extremely quiescent, with Shakura-Sunyaev turbulence parameters $\alpha_{\nu} \sim 10^{-4}$. We conclude that for most of parameter space corresponding to values of $\alpha_{\nu}$ reflected in observations of protoplanetary disks ($\gtrsim 10^{-4}$), pairwise collisions constitute the dominant pathway of rocky planet accretion. Our results are discussed in the context of super-Earth origins and Earth's accretion history.