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Dust-free modeling of dusty protoplanetary disks

Image Credit: Min-Kai Lin, Andrew Youdin

Isothermal gas with dust is equivalent to pure gas with cooling.

Planets are built from planetesimals, themselves built from tiny dust grains immersed in gaseous protoplanetary disks around young stars. Understanding how small dust particles interact with their gaseous environments is crucial to planet formation theory. In this work, we describe a novel approach to modeling dusty gas. We show that isothermal, dusty-gas is physically and mathematically equivalent to pure gas dynamics for sufficiently small particles. This allows us to gain deeper physical insight into dusty-gas phenomena in the language of standard hydrodynamics, as well as perform numerical simulations of dusty protoplanetary disks using publicly available gas dynamics codes. Lin & Youdin. 2017, ApJ, 849, 129 (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?arXiv:1708.02945).