Testing Models of Disk Formation and Gravito-Viscous Evolution Against Observations of Young Protoplanetary Disks
Authors: Fabiola Antonietta Gerosa, Paola Pinilla, Eduard I. Vorobyov, James McKevitt
Abstract
Young protoplanetary disks have received increasing attention in recent years, due to observations revealing the presence of substructures in disks younger than one million years, suggesting that planet formation may begin earlier than previously thought. Other recent observations have provided new insights into the evolution of gas and dust in these early stages, enabling comparisons with evolved Class II disks. Yet the physical processes governing the earliest stages of disk evolution remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present two-dimensional thin-disk hydrodynamical simulations of the formation and early evolution of protoplanetary disks, under the influence of self-gravity and turbulent viscosity alone. We explore various properties of disks forming from the collapse of clouds with a range of initial masses and we compare our results with surveys of protoplanetary disks across multiple evolutionary stages. Our simulations broadly reproduce key observational constraints, including the mm fluxes of Class 0 disks and the dust disk radii of later stages. However, our models do not explain the observed gas and dust disk masses of Class I and II disks: while they account for the most massive observed disks, they fail to reproduce the least massive ones. We discuss that simulations incorporating the influence of the star-forming environment might be needed to resolve this discrepancy.
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Abstract
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Evolution of Dust In Protoplanetary Disks With Magnetized Winds models dust evolution under wind-driven transport rather than the self-gravity and turbulent-viscosity mechanisms studied here.
Abstract
Observations and theory increasingly indicate that protoplanetary disks are weakly turbulent, implying that magnetized disk winds may dominate their angular momentum transport and long-term evolution. Yet dust evolution in wind-dominated disks remains poorly understood, despite its importance for planet formation. In particular, whether wind-dominated disk evolution can create regions with enhanced dust-to-gas mass ratios that enable planetesimal formation via the streaming instability is unclear. We build a parametric hybrid disk evolution model that includes turbulent accretion, wind-driven accretion, and wind-driven mass loss to investigate dust evolution in magnetized protoplanetary disk…
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Abstract
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Abstract
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Thermochemical constraints on a primordial-origin of gas-rich debris disks tests whether primordial gas can explain observations of older debris disks.
In short
Thermochemical models support a primordial origin for CO-rich debris disks under dust-poor, weak-ionisation conditions, but predict neutral-carbon emission more extended than observed.
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Thermochemical constraints on a primordial-origin of gas-rich debris disksH. Mitani, W. Ooyama, R. Nakatani et al. · 2026 · Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · AI summary available
Thermochemical constraints on a primordial-origin of gas-rich debris disks tests whether primordial gas can explain observations of older debris disks.
In short
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SPH Simulations of Counterrotating Disk Formation in Spiral Galaxies studies gas-infall and merger mechanisms forming galactic disks, not protoplanetary disks.
Abstract
We present the results of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of the formation of a massive counterrotating disk in a spiral galaxy. The current study revisits and extends (with SPH) previous work carried out with sticky particle gas dynamics, in which adiabatic gas infall and a retrograde gas-rich dwarf merger were tested as the two most likely processes for producing such a counterrotating disk. We report on experiments with a cold primary similar to our Galaxy, as well as a hot, compact primary modeled after NGC 4138. We have also conducted numerical experiments with varying amounts of prograde gas in the primary disk, and an alternative infall model (a spherical shell with …
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Revised description of dust diffusion and a new instability creating multiple rings in protoplanetary disksRyosuke T. Tominaga, Sanemichi Z. Takahashi, Shu-ichiro Inutsuka · 2019 · Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · cited 41 times · AI summary available
Revised description of dust diffusion formulates angular-momentum-conserving dust transport and a ring-forming instability in protoplanetary disks.
Abstract
Various instabilities have been proposed as a promising mechanism to accumulate dust. Moreover, some of them are expected to lead to the multiple-ring structure formation and the planetesimal formation in protoplanetary disks. In a turbulent gaseous disk, the growth of the instabilities and the dust accumulation are quenched by turbulent diffusion of dust grains. The diffusion process has been often modeled by a diffusion term in the continuity equation for the dust density. The dust diffusion model, however, does not guarantee the angular momentum conservation in a disk. In this study, we first formulate equations that describe the dust diffusion and also conserve the total angular momentum…
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