Issue |
A&A
Volume 694, February 2025
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A78 | |
Number of page(s) | 5 | |
Section | Planets, planetary systems, and small bodies | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202452068 | |
Published online | 04 February 2025 |
Clusters of tribocharged dust aggregates as pebbles in protoplanetary disks
University of Duisburg-Essen, Faculty of Physics,
Lotharstr. 1,
47057
Duisburg,
Germany
★ Corresponding author; florence.onyeagusi@uni-due.de
Received:
30
August
2024
Accepted:
20
December
2024
In recent years, the tribocharging of colliding and bouncing submillimeter (submm) particles has been studied as a possible mechanism promoting the formation of large pebbles on centimeter (cm) to decimeter (dm) scales in protoplanetary disks. Here, we observe, for the first time, that it is not only monolithic, spherical particles, but also real dust aggregates, that become tribocharged and end up forming large clusters. For aggregates of ~0.4 mm consisting of ~1 micrometer (µm) sized dust, we determined net charge densities up to 10−7 C/m2 during our drop tower experiments. These charged aggregates form compact clusters up to 2 cm in size via collisions with other clusters and aggregates at collision velocities on the order of 1 cm/s. Size and speed are the only lower limits for growth, currently set by the limits of the experiment. However, these clusters already form under conditions that are well beyond the expected transition to bouncing for uncharged aggregates and clusters. Our findings further support the idea that collisional charging can leapfrog the traditional bouncing barrier and form larger clusters that then serve as large pebbles. These cm-sized clusters are more susceptible to further evolutionary steps via particle trapping, concentration, and planetesimal formation.
Key words: planets and satellites: formation / protoplanetary disks
© The Authors 2025
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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