Fakultät für Physik und Astronomie
STEPHEN PHILLIPS hostreviews.co.uk / UNSPLASH

Rings in protoplanetary disks: planets or ring instabilities?

Cornelis Dullemond , ZAH/ITA

The famous ALMA image of the disk around HL Tau shows that that protoplanetary disk consists of numerous concentric nearly perfect rings. In the mean time several new disk sources have revealed similar multi-ring patterns. These patterns have been interpreted by many astronomers as being caused by several low mass planets opening gaps in the disk. However, the planets themselves have not yet been detected, raising the possibility that perhaps these rings might have a completely different (and equally interesting) origin: that they are caused by disk-internal slow instabilities. The slowness is important, because a fast instability leads to a clumpy/turbulent disk. A sufficiently slow instability, however, can allow communication between gas parcels 360 degrees along their orbits, thus allowing density fluctuations to tidally smear out, coordinate and merge into rings. I will discuss two such potential instabilities, both related to the dust in the disk, and whether they might be at the origin of these rings.

ITA "blackboard" Colloquium
9 Oct 2017, 11:15
Philosophenweg 12, 106

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