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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