A Lagrangian model for dust evolution in protoplanetary disks: formation of wet and dry planetesimals at different stellar masses

¹ Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1090 GE Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: d.schoonenberg@uva.nl
² Department of the Geophysical Sciences, The University of Chicago, 5734 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Received: 8 August 2018
Accepted: 3 October 2018

Abstract

We introduce a new Lagrangian smooth-particle method to model the growth and drift of pebbles in protoplanetary disks. The Lagrangian nature of the model makes it especially suited to following characteristics of individual (groups of) particles, such as their composition. In this work we focus on the water content of solid particles. Planetesimal formation via streaming instability is taken into account, partly based on previous results on streaming instability outside the water snowline that were presented in a recent publication. We validated our model by reproducing earlier results from the literature and apply our model to steady-state viscous gas disks (with constant gas accretion rate) around stars with different masses. We also present various other models where we explore the effects of pebble accretion, the fragmentation velocity threshold, the global metallicity of the disk, and a time-dependent gas accretion rate. We find that planetesimals preferentially form in a local annulus outside the water snowline, at early times in the lifetime of the disk (≲10⁵ yr), when the pebble mass fluxes are high enough to trigger the streaming instability. During this first phase in the planet formation process, the snowline location hardly changes due to slow viscous evolution, and we conclude that assuming a constant gas accretion rate is justified in this first stage. The efficiency of converting the solids reservoir of the disk to planetesimals depends on the location of the water snowline. Cooler disks with a closer-in water snowline are more efficient at producing planetesimals than hotter disks where the water snowline is located further away from the star. Therefore, low-mass stars tend to form planetesimals more efficiently, but any correlation may be overshadowed by the spread in disk properties.