Compaction during fragmentation and bouncing produces realistic dust grain porosities in protoplanetary discs

¹ Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, CRAL UMR5574, ENS de Lyon, CNRS, Villeurbanne 69622, France
e-mail: jean-francois.gonzalez@ens-lyon.fr
² School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University, Vic. 3800, Australia

Received: 24 February 2024
Accepted: 21 June 2024

Abstract

Context. In protoplanetary discs, micron-sized dust grows to form millimetre- to centimetre-sized pebbles but encounters several barriers during its evolution. Collisional fragmentation and radial drift impede further dust growth to planetesimal size. Fluffy grains have been hypothesised to solve these problems. While porosity leads to faster grain growth, the implied porosity values obtained from previous simulations were larger than suggested by observations.

Aims. In this paper, we study the influence of porosity on dust evolution, taking into account growth, bouncing, fragmentation, compaction, rotational disruption, and snow lines, in order to understand their impact on dust evolution.

Methods. We developed a module for porosity evolution for the 3D smoothed particle hydrodynamics code PHANTOM that accounts for dust growth and fragmentation. This mono-disperse model is integrated into both a 1D code and the 3D code to capture the overall evolution of dust and gas.

Results. We show that porosity helps dust growth and leads to the formation of larger solids than when considering compact grains, as predicted by previous work. Our simulations taking into account compaction during fragmentation show that large millimetre grains are still formed but are ten to 100 times more compact. Thus, millimetre sizes with typical filling factors of ~0.1 match the values measured on comets or via polarimetric observations of protoplanetary discs.