PF-02-0048

The interplay of gas, dust and magnetorotational instability evolution in protoplanetary disks

Timmy N. Delage, Matias Garate, Satoshi Okuzumi, Paola Pinilla, Mario Flock, Chao-Chin Yang, Tilman Birnstiel, Sebastian Markus Stamler

An intricate puzzle in the current planet formation theory is how the dust grow from interstellar micron-sized grains to kilometer-sized planetesimals in protoplanetary disks (PPDs), the birth environment of planets. Though, it is a crucial step for understanding the emergence of newborn planets. This poster aims to bridge this gap by specifically investigating how the evolution of gas, dust with grain growth processes included, and magnetorotational instability (MRI) interlink over million years in PPDs -where the MRI is one of the main candidates for the mass and angular momentum transport. Since PPDs are poorly ionized and weakly coupled to magnetic fields, the MRI cannot operate everywhere, and a magnetically dead zone naturally arises within which the gas turbulence level is low and dominated by hydrodynamic stresses. The outer edge of the magnetically dead zone has been previously hypothesized to be a sweet spot for dust particles to coagulate into larger sizes, hence potentially forming planetesimals, due to the sharp change in the gas turbulence. To assess this idea, we present the very first unified 1D disk evolution framework that captures self-consistently the interplay between gas, dust evolution and MRI-driven accretion over million years. This work sheds light on a new pathway to generate observable spontaneous dust rings within the magnetically dead zone. Planetesimals may form in these dust rings under certain conditions, hence being potential birth-sites for planets.