Bouncing Grains Keep Protoplanetary Disks Bright

TL;DR

This paper proposes that bouncing barriers in protoplanetary disks keep small grains abundant, maintaining brightness over millions of years despite grain growth and radial drift, challenging previous assumptions about disk evolution.

Contribution

It introduces the bouncing barrier as a key mechanism that stalls grain growth at 100 microns, explaining long-lived brightness in older disks.

Findings

Disks in older regions like Upper Scorpius remain optically thick and bright.

Bouncing barriers prevent grains from growing beyond 100 microns.

Small grains are tightly coupled to gas, reducing radial drift.

Abstract

Proto-planetary disks display the so-called size-luminosity relation, where their mm-wavelength fluxes scale linearly with their emitting areas. This suggests that these disks are optically thick in mm-band, an interpretation further supported by their near-black-body spectral indexes. Such characteristics are seen not only among disks in very young star-forming regions like Lupus (1-3 Myrs), but, as we demonstrate here, also among disks in the much older Upper Scorpius region (5-11 Myrs). How can disks shine brightly for so long, when grain growth and subsequent radial drift should have quickly depleted their solid reservoir? Here, we suggest that the "bouncing barrier" provides the answer. Even colliding at very low speeds (below 1cm/s), grains already fail to stick to each other but instead bounce off in-elastically. This barrier stalls grain growth at a near-universal size of 100 micron. These small grains experience much reduced radial drift, and so are able to keep the disks bright for millions of years. They are also tightly coupled to gas, offering poor prospects for processes like streaming instability or pebble accretion. We speculate briefly on how planetesimals can arise in such a bath of 100-micron grains.