Chondrules are millimeter-sized spherules that dominate primitive meteorites (chondrites) originating from the asteroid belt. The incorporation of chondrules into asteroidal bodies must be an important step in planet formation, but the mechanism is n
ot understood. We show that the main growth of asteroids can result from gas-drag-assisted accretion of chondrules. The largest planetesimals of a population with a characteristic radius of 100 km undergo run-away accretion of chondrules within ~3 Myr, forming planetary embryos up to Mars sizes along with smaller asteroids whose size distribution matches that of main belt asteroids. The aerodynamical accretion leads to size-sorting of chondrules consistent with chondrites. Accretion of mm-sized chondrules and ice particles drives the growth of planetesimals beyond the ice line as well, but the growth time increases above the disk life time outside of 25 AU. The contribution of direct planetesimal accretion to the growth of both asteroids and Kuiper belt objects is minor. In contrast, planetesimal accretion and chondrule accretion play more equal roles for the formation of Moon-sized embryos in the terrestrial planet formation region. These embryos are isolated from each other and accrete planetesimals only at a low rate. However, the continued accretion of chondrules destabilizes the oligarchic configuration and leads to the formation of Mars-sized embryos and terrestrial planets by a combination of direct chondrule accretion and giant impacts.
The formation of high-mass stars is usually accompanied by powerful protostellar outflows. Such high-mass outflows are not simply scaled-u
Meteoritic chondrules were formed in the early solar system by brief heating of silicate dust to melting temperatures. Some highly refractory grains (Type B calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, CAIs) also show signs of transient heating. A similar proce
ss may occur in other protoplanetary disks, as evidenced by observations of spectra characteristic of crystalline silicates. One possible environment for this process is the turbulent magnetohydrodynamic flow thought to drive accretion in these disks. Such flows generally form thin current sheets, which are sites of magnetic reconnection, and dissipate the magnetic fields amplified by a disk dynamo. We suggest that it is possible to heat precursor grains for chondrules and other high-temperature minerals in current sheets that have been concentrated by our recently described short-circuit instability. We extend our work on this process by including the effects of radiative cooling, taking into account the temperature dependence of the opacity; and by examining current sheet geometry in three-dimensional, global models of magnetorotational instability. We find that temperatures above 1600 K can be reached for favorable parameters that match the ideal global models. This mechanism could provide an efficient means of tapping the gravitational potential energy of the protoplanetary disk to heat grains strongly enough to form high-temperature minerals. The volume-filling nature of turbulent magnetic reconnection is compatible with constraints from chondrule-matrix complementarity, chondrule-chondrule complementarity, the occurrence of igneous rims, and compound chondrules. The same short-circuit mechanism may perform other high-temperature mineral processing in protoplanetary disks such as the production of crystalline silicates and CAIs.
The recent discovery of two Earth-mass planets in close orbits around an evolved star has raised questions as to whether substellar companions can survive encounters with their host stars. We consider whether these companions could have been stripped
of significant amounts of mass during the phase when they orbited through the dense inner envelopes of the giant. We apply the criterion derived by Murray et al. for disruption of gravitationally bound objects by ram pressure, to determine whether mass loss may have played a role in the histories of these and other recently discovered low-mass companions to evolved stars. We find that the brown dwarf and Jovian mass objects circling WD 0137-349, SDSS J08205+0008, and HIP 13044 are most unlikely to have lost significant mass during the common envelope phase. However, the Earth-mass planets found around KIC 05807616 could well be the remnant of one or two Jovian mass planets that lost extensive mass during the common envelope phase.
The formation of massive stars exceeding 10 solar masses usually results in large-scale molecular outflows. Numerical simulations, including ionization, of the formation of such stars show evidence for ionization-driven molecular outflows. We here ex
amine whether the outflows seen in these models reproduce the observations. We compute synthetic ALMA and CARMA maps of CO emission lines of the outflows, and compare their signatures to existing single-dish and interferometric data. We find that the ionization-driven models can only reproduce weak outflows around high-mass star-forming regions. We argue that expanding H II regions probably do not represent the dominant mechanism for driving observed outflows. We suggest instead that observed outflows are driven by the collective action of the outflows from the many lower-mass stars that inevitably form around young massive stars in a cluster.
We present three-dimensional numerical simulations of particle clumping and planetesimal formation in protoplanetary disks with varying amounts of solid material. As centimeter-size pebbles settle to the mid-plane, turbulence develops through vertica
l shearing and streaming instabilities. We find that when the pebble-to-gas column density ratio is 0.01, corresponding roughly to solar metallicity, clumping is weak, so the pebble density rarely exceeds the gas density. Doubling the column density ratio leads to a dramatic increase in clumping, with characteristic particle densities more than ten times the gas density and maximum densities reaching several thousand times the gas density. This is consistent with unstratified simulations of the streaming instability that show strong clumping in particle dominated flows. The clumps readily contract gravitationally into interacting planetesimals of order 100 km in radius. Our results suggest that the correlation between host star metallicity and exoplanets may reflect the early stages of planet formation. We further speculate that initially low metallicity disks can be particle enriched during the gas dispersal phase, leading to a late burst of planetesimal formation.
Feedback from massive stars is one of the least understood aspects of galaxy formation. We perform a suite of vertically stratified local interstellar medium (ISM) simulations in which supernova rates and vertical gas column densities are systematica
lly varied based on the Schmidt-Kennicutt law. Our simulations have a sufficiently high spatial resolution (1.95 pc) to follow the hydrodynamic interactions among multiple supernovae that structure the ISM. At a given supernova rate, we find that the mean mass-weighted sound speed and velocity dispersion decrease as the inverse square root of gas density, indicating that both thermal and turbulent pressures are nearly constant in the midplane, so the effective equation of state is isobaric. In contrast, across our four models having supernova rates that range from one to 512 times the Galactic supernova rate, the mass-weighted velocity dispersion remains in the range 4-6 km/s. Hence, gas averaged over ~100 pc regions follows an effective equation of state that is close to isothermal. Simulated H I emission lines have widths of 10-18 km/s, comparable to observed values. In our highest supernova rate model, superbubble blow-outs occur, and the turbulent pressure on large scales is >~4 times higher than the thermal pressure. We find a tight correlation between the thermal and turbulent pressures averaged over ~100 pc regions in the midplane of each model, as well as across the four ISM models. We construct a subgrid model for turbulent pressure based on analytic arguments and explicitly calibrate it against our stratified ISM simulations. The subgrid model provides a simple yet physically motivated way to include supernova feedback in cosmological simulations.
