Daniel Wanner   (Germany)

 d-wanner @ mpia.de

From Pebbles to Planets: Planet Formation and Migration in Turbulent Disks

 

The formation of planets is a process that spans many orders of magnitude in scale, typically starting from microscopic dust grains, growing into pebbles, collapsing into planetesimals regulated by the Streaming Instability, and culminating in fully formed planets.

As part of the TiPPi project, I will study how the Streaming Instability can influence the size and distribution of pebble clouds via turbulent diffusion. We will develop numerical simulations combining Adaptive Mesh Refinement methods with a Tree algorithm for particle self-gravity, resolving the gravitational collapse of pebble clouds while maintaining large-scale turbulence in global simulations.

Additionally, I will investigate the effect of hydrodynamic turbulence on the migration behavior of planetesimals and low-mass planets. Turbulence induces stochastic torques, leading to a diffusive evolution of a planet’s semi-major axis. By systematically varying planet masses and turbulence levels, I will characterize this stochastic migration.

 

Supervisor:    Hubert Klahr    (MPIA)