Turbulence, pebbles and planetesimals : the origin of minor bodies in the Solar System

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• Hubert Klahr (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)
• Monday 20 November 2023, 14:00-15:00
• MR14 DAMTP and online.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Roger Dufresne.

“Without turbulence – no planets – no Solar System – no life on Earth.”

The Solar System’s minor bodies, asteroids, trojans, comets and Kuiper belt objects, are leftover planetary building blocks called planetesimals. The largest of these planetesimals grew into planets through collisions and the accretion of large grains called pebbles. Despite their importance we still do not know where and when they were born in the solar nebula.

Here I report on our numerical experiments connecting three stages of planetesimal formation 1.) the evolution of the dust size distribution in the turbulence of a circumstellar disk, 2.) concentration and diffusion of pebbles in geostrophic flow features as vortices and zonal flows and 3.) the gravitational collapse of pebble clouds into clusters of planetesimals.

With our ongoing project we aim to calibrate the planetesimal formation process against observational and laboratory data for minor bodies in the Solar System, allowing to reconstruct the turbulence during the birth of the Solar System and connecting our home world to the diversity of exoplanets.

This talk is part of the DAMTP Astrophysics Seminars series.

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