Planetesimal formation: shear instabilities at the dust-rich mid-plane

Jacques Masson, ENS Cachan
Advisor: Eugene Chiang, Berkeley

Abstract: We have studied the stability of the thin dust-rich midplane in a protostellar disk. The layer tends to be broken apart by the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability due to differential velocities in the vertical direction, but is stabilized by the stretching of this instability thanks to the Coriolis force and radial shear. We found two trends depending on the metallicity at the midplane, which support previous studies and go further on which criteria is relevant to study these layers numerically..

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