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Dynamics of Protoplanetary Disk

Image Credit: Min-Kai Lin, Jhih-Wei Chen

Footprints of planet formation. Interaction between a low mass protoplanet and its dusty protoplanetary disk.

The figure shows a numerical simulation of the interaction between a 10 Earth-mass planet and a dusty protoplanetary disk. The planet carves a single, shallow gas gap, but a deep, double gap in the dust. This interaction may explain recent ALMA observations of rings and gaps in real protoplanetary disks. This simulation was carried out with an in-house version of the popular PLUTO hydrodynamics code, modified to simultaneously evolve a population of small dust grains mixed with the gas. Chen & Lin, 2018 The simulation was run on the TIARA cluster.