Planetesimal Formation by Gravitational Instability of a Porous-Dust Disk

Abstract

Recently it is proposed that porous icy dust aggregates are formed by pairwise accretion of dust aggregates beyond the snowline. We calculate the equilibrium random velocity of porous dust aggregates taking into account mutual gravitational scattering, collisions, gas drag, and turbulent stirring and scattering. We find that the disk of porous dust aggregates becomes gravitationally unstable as they evolve through gravitational compression in the minimum-mass solar nebula model for a reasonable range of turbulence strength, which leads to rapid formation of planetesimals.