Lee, H., Nayakshin, S. and Booth, R.A. orcid.org/0000-0002-0364-937X (2025) Dust growth and planet formation by disc fragmentation. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 544 (1). slaf096. ISSN: 1745-3925
Abstract
It is often argued that gravitational instability of realistic protoplanetary discs is only possible at distances larger than ∼50 au from the central star, requiring high disc masses and accretion rates, and that therefore disc fragmentation results in the production of brown dwarfs rather than gas giant planets. However, the effects of dust growth on opacity can be very significant but have not been taken into account systematically in the models of fragmenting discs. We employ dust opacity that depends on both temperature and maximum grain size to evaluate analytically the properties of a critically fragmenting protoplanetary disc. We find that dust growth may promote disc fragmentation at disc radii as small as ∼30 au. As a result, the critical disc masses and accretion rates are smaller, and the initial fragment masses are in the gas giant planet mass regime. While this suggests that formation of gas giant planets by disc fragmentation may be more likely than usually believed, we caution that numerical models of the process are needed to evaluate the effects not taken into account here, e.g. dust grain mobility and fragment evolution after disc fragmentation.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | planets and satellites: formation, protoplanetary discs |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) |
Date Deposited: | 29 Sep 2025 11:20 |
Last Modified: | 29 Sep 2025 11:20 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/mnrasl/slaf096 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:232109 |