Collaborative EAGER Proposal: The Dead Zones of Protoplanetary Disks are Not Dead - How Turbulence Transports Angular Momentum and Forms Planetesimals

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This EAGER award funds a collaborative study to study the turbulence of gas and dust in the material that will form planets around stars. The mechanism to be studied could be important in forming the small rocky bodies that are the cores of future planets, and whose process of formation is poorly understood. This study has potential impact in understanding the formation of our own Solar System and of the planets around other stars. The research will create a team consisting of undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars. The collaborative nature of our research will synergistically provide opportunities for students at San Francisco State University, a minority-serving non-PHD institution, to work with students and faculty at University of California at Berkeley. The investigators will also train and mentor a postdoctoral researcher.To accomplish their science goals, the team will compute angular momentum transport in a protoplanetary disk (PPD) dead zone filled with large-amplitude turbulence, compute the rate at which dust and rocks accumulate and agglomerate in a turbulent PPD, and compute mixing in a PPD. In particular, they will determine if the ingredients from which chondrules form become sufficiently mixed that their composition agrees with observations. They will also develop the capability to carry out the above-listed calculation of momentum transport efficiently by extending their current spectral code, which works with anelastic flows, to one that works with fully-compressible flows with Mach numbers less than 3 (as in dead zones). The team will develop the capability to carry out the above-listed calculations of planetesimal and chondrule formation efficiently by replacing their "particle-tracking" code with one that models the rocks and dust as different phases of the fluid flow.