No Arabic abstract
Context: Anticyclonic vortices are considered as a favourable places for trapping dust and forming planetary embryos. On the other hand, they are massive blobs that can interact gravitationally with the planets in the disc. Aims: We aim to study how a vortex interacts gravitationally with a planet which migrates toward it or a planet which is created inside the vortex. Methods: We performed hydrodynamical simulations of a viscous locally isothermal disc using GFARGO and FARGO-ADSG. We set a stationary Gaussian pressure bump in the disc in a way that RWI is triggered. After a large vortex is established, we implanted a low mass planet in the outer disc or inside the vortex and allowed it to migrate. We also examined the effect of vortex strength on the planet migration and checked the validity of the final result in the presence of self-gravity. Results: We noticed regardless of the planets initial position, the planet is finally locked to the vortex or its migration is stopped in a farther orbital distance in case of a stronger vortex. For the model with the weaker vortex, we studied the effect of different parameters such as background viscosity, background surface density, mass of the planet and different planet positions. In these models, while the trapping time and locking angle of the planet vary for different parameters, the main result, which is the planet-vortex locking, remains valid. We discovered that even a planet with a mass less than 5 * 10^{-7} M_{star} comes out from the vortex and is locked to it at the same orbital distance. For a stronger vortex, both in non-self-gravitated and self-gravitating models, the planet migration is stopped far away from the radial position of the vortex. This effect can make the vortices a suitable place for continual planet formation under the condition that they save their shape during the planetary growth.
Chaotic dynamics are expected during and after planet formation, and a leading mechanism to explain large eccentricities of gas giant exoplanets is planet-planet gravitational scattering. The same scattering has been invoked to explain misalignments of planetary orbital planes with respect to their host stars spin. However, an observational puzzle is presented by Kepler-56, which has two inner planets (b and c) that are nearly coplanar with each other, yet are more than 45 degrees inclined to their stars equator. Thus the spin-orbit misalignment might be primordial. Instead, we further develop the hypothesis in the discovery paper, that planets on wider orbits generated misalignment through scattering, and as a result gently torqued the inner planets away from the equator plane of the star. We integrated the equations of motion for Kepler-56 b and c along with an unstable outer system initialized with either two or three Jupiter-mass planets. We address here whether the violent scattering that generates large mutual inclinations can leave the inner system intact, tilting it gently. In almost all of the cases initially with two outer planets, either the inner planets remain nearly coplanar with each other in the stars equator plane, or they are scattered violently to high mutual inclination and high spin-orbit misalignment. On the contrary, of the systems with three unstable outer planets, a spin-orbit misalignment large enough to explain the observations is generated 28% of the time for coplanar inner planets, which is consistent with the observed frequency of this phenomenon reported so far. We conclude that multiple-planet scattering in the outer parts of the system may account for this new population of coplanar planets hosted by oblique stars.
Context. During their journey to perihelion, comets may appear in the field-of-view of space-borne optical instruments, showing in some cases a nicely developed plasma tail extending from their coma and exhibiting an oscillatory behaviour. Aims. The oscillations of cometary tails may be explained in terms of vortex shedding because of the interaction of the comet with the solar wind streams. Therefore, it is possible to exploit these oscillations in order to infer the value of the Strouhal number $St$, which quantifies the vortex shedding phenomenon, and the physical properties of the local medium. Methods. We used the Heliospheric Imager (HI) data of the Solar TErrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission to study the oscillations of the tails of the comets 2P/Encke and C/2012 S1 (ISON) during their perihelion in Nov 2013, determining the Strouhal numbers from the estimates of the halo size, the relative speed of the solar wind flow and the period of the oscillations. Results. We found that the estimated Strouhal numbers are very small, and the typical value of $Stsim0.2$ would be extrapolated for size of the halo larger than $sim10^6$ km. Conclusions. Despite the vortex shedding phenomenon has not been unambiguously revealed, the findings suggest that some MHD instability process is responsible for the observed behaviour of cometary tails, which can be exploited for probing the physical conditions of the near-Sun region.
We study the long term orbital evolution of a terrestrial planet under the gravitational perturbations of a giant planet. In particular, we are interested in situations where the two planets are in the same plane and are relatively close. We examine both possible configurations: the giant planet orbit being either outside or inside the orbit of the smaller planet. The perturbing potential is expanded to high orders and an analytical solution of the terrestrial planetary orbit is derived. The analytical estimates are then compared against results from the numerical integration of the full equations of motion and we find that the analytical solution works reasonably well. An interesting finding is that the new analytical estimates improve greatly the predictions for the timescales of the orbital evolution of the terrestrial planet compared to an octupole order expansion. Finally, we briefly discuss possible applications of the analytical estimates in astrophysical problems.
In this paper, we present results from a multi-stage numerical campaign to begin to explain and determine why extreme debris disk detections are rare, what types of impacts will result in extreme debris disks and what we can learn about the parameters of the collision from the extreme debris disks. We begin by simulating many giant impacts using a smoothed particle hydrodynamical code with tabulated equations of state and track the escaping vapour from the collision. Using an $N$-body code, we simulate the spatial evolution of the vapour generated dust post-impact. We show that impacts release vapour anisotropically not isotropically as has been assumed previously and that the distribution of the resulting generated dust is dependent on the mass ratio and impact angle of the collision. In addition, we show that the anisotropic distribution of post-collision dust can cause the formation or lack of formation of the short-term variation in flux depending on the orientation of the collision with respect to the orbit around the central star. Finally, our results suggest that there is a narrow region of semi-major axis where a vapour generated disk would be observable for any significant amount of time implying that giant impacts where most of the escaping mass is in vapour would not be observed often but this does not mean that the collisions are not occurring.
We study the evolution of protoplanetary discs that would have been precursors of a Trappist-1 like system under the action of accretion and external photoevaporation in different radiation environments. Dust grains swiftly grow above the critical size below which they are entrained in the photoevaporative wind, so although gas is continually depleted, dust is resilient to photoevaporation after only a short time. This means that the ratio of the mass in solids (dust plus planetary) to the mass in gas rises steadily over time. Dust is still stripped early on, and the initial disc mass required to produce the observed $4,M_{oplus}$ of Trappist-1 planets is high. For example, assuming a Fatuzzo & Adams (2008) distribution of UV fields, typical initial disc masses have to be $>30,$per cent the stellar (which are still Toomre $Q$ stable) for the majority of similar mass M dwarfs to be viable hosts of the Trappist-1 planets. Even in the case of the lowest UV environments observed, there is a strong loss of dust due to photoevaporation at early times from the weakly bound outer regions of the disc. This minimum level of dust loss is a factor two higher than that which would be lost by accretion onto the star during 10 Myr of evolution. Consequently even in these least irradiated environments, discs that are viable Trappist-1 precursors need to be initially massive ($>10,$per cent of the stellar mass).