Over a period of 6 years, DFG is funding research projects within its SPP framework (DFG-Schwerpunktprogramm) "Building a Habitable Earth". The SPP will contribute to the still open question how Earth became the only known habitable planet.
Evolution of the gas (dashed lines), dust (dotted lines) and planetesimal (solid lines) surface density for a simulation without gas evolution (left panels) and with gas evolution (right panels), where the trap efficiency εp is set to 10%. The upper panels show a time series of the surface densities as a function of radius and the lower ones the densities at local positions as a function of time. The underlaying gray lines in the upper panels denote the minimum mass Solar Nebula. The characteristic kink around 0.8AU is caused by the iceline within which water evaporates.
Evolution of the gas (dashed lines), dust (dotted lines) and planetesimal (solid lines) surface density for a simulation without gas evolution (left panels) and with gas evolution (right panels), where the trap efficiency εp is set to 10%. The upper panels show a time series of the surface densities as a function of radius and the lower ones the densities at local positions as a function of time. The underlaying gray lines in the upper panels denote the minimum mass Solar Nebula. The characteristic kink around 0.8AU is caused by the iceline within which water evaporates.
We are participating in this collaboration with the project Identifying the origin of Earth's building material: Where do the earth building Planetesimals and Pebbles originate from? A numerical approach of the accretion phase of the earth.
Planetesimal Formation
This graph shows how the number of planetesimals in a protoplanetary disk increases as a function of time. Different curves represent different models where the level of turbulence (α), and the formation efficiency was varied and different drag regimes were considered (St = 1/0 corresponds to Stokes drag considered/not considered). Use the buttons to highlight various parameters.
Planet Population Synthesis is a statistical approach to study the conditions necessary for planet formation and evolution. We utilize the Bern model of planet formation and evolution (Alibert et al. 2013) within a population synthesis framework (Mordasini et al. 2009) to improve our understanding of key processes in planet formation, creating testable predictions in the process.
Streaming instabilities are a result of sufficient dust densities and large relative flow velocities between dust and gas. This instability itself produces the turbulence that makes it possible to clump dust sufficiently together in order to become self-gravitating and thus overcome the meter-barrier in planet formation. This mechanism is thus of significant interest for the scientific community.
A sufficiently massive planet will induce spiral arms, gap formation, migration and accretion shocks in his surrounding disk. We attempt to understand how all those processes backreact onto planetary formation and disk evolution.
In order to link planetary population synthesis modells with observations, evolution calculations for single planets are needed. This is obvious as no planet is observed at an age of zero. We use atmospheric and structure modells planets, as well as atmospheric loss and bloating mechanisms for giant and rocky planets to develop our understanding of planetary populations.
The amplification or dampening of hydrodynamically instable features may be modified by the presence of dust. Also the dynamics of dust will surely follow pressure maxima in a protoplanetary disc. Therefore there is ample potential for complex interactions between the gas and dust material which we aim to study.
Hydrodynamic instabilities may lead to vortex formation and thus initiate dust concentration in the inner Protoplanetary disk (<100Au) or lead to direct gravitational collapse and giant planet collapse in the outer disk. We investigate various scenarios for the stability and involved timescales of those features in shearing boxes, global 2D and 3D simulations.
