This title appears in the Scientific Report :
2016
Please use the identifier:
http://hdl.handle.net/2128/10415 in citations.
The Formation of Planetesimals: Building Bricks for Planetary Systems
The Formation of Planetesimals: Building Bricks for Planetary Systems
The asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects are left overs of building material for our earth and the other planets in our solar systems from 4.567 billion years ago. Those typically 100 km large objects are called planetesimals, built up from icy and dusty grains. In our current paradigm of planet format...
| Personal Name(s): | Klahr, H. |
|---|---|
| Schreiber, A. | |
| Contributing Institute: |
John von Neumann - Institut für Computing; NIC |
| Published in: |
NIC Symposium 2016 |
| Imprint: |
Jülich
Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Zentralbibliothek
2016
|
| Physical Description: |
61-68 |
| Conference: | NIC Symposium 2016, Jülich (Germany), 2016-02-11 - 2016-02-12 |
| Document Type: |
Contribution to a conference proceedings |
| Research Program: |
Addenda |
| Series Title: |
NIC Series
48 |
| Link: |
OpenAccess OpenAccess |
| Publikationsportal JuSER |
|
The asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects are left overs of building material for our earth and the other planets in our solar systems from 4.567 billion years ago. Those typically 100 km large objects are called planetesimals, built up from icy and dusty grains. In our current paradigm of planet formation it was turbulent flows and metastable flow patterns like zonal flows and vortices that concentrated mm to cm sized grains in sufficient numbers that a streaming instability and gravitational collapse of these particle clumps was triggered. The entire picture is known as gravoturbulent formation of planetesimals. What was missing until recently was a physically motivated prediction on the typical sizes at which planetesimals should form via this process. Our old simulations on JUGENE in Jülich had only shown a correlation between numerical resolution and planetesimal size and thus no answer was possible. But with the latest series of simulations on JUQUEEN covering all the length scales down to the physical size of actual planetesimals we were able to obtain values for the turbulent particle diffusion as a function of the particle load in the gas. Thus we have all necessary data at hand to feed our back of the envelope calculation that predicts the size of planetesimals as result of a competition between gravitational concentration and turbulent diffusion. Using the diffusion values obtained in the numerical simulations on JUQUEEN predicts planetesimal sizes on the order of 100 km, which luckily coincides with the measured data from both asteroids as well from Kuiper Belt objects. |