Dynamics of planetesimal rings
speaker: Yohsuke Mizutani
Abstract:
The existence of planetesimal rings in planet formation has attracted attention from both observational and theoretical perspectives. However, most of the studies discussing planet formation based on the assumption of planetesimal rings do not follow the growth of the planetesimal rings themselves. Moreover, although orbital evolution of individual planetesimals and planetesimal accumulation in planetesimal systems have been studied, the consideration these system as a ring and the study on the evolution of the ring itself have not yet been done. Purpose of this study is to understand the evolution of planetesimal rings. As a first step, we focused on the orbital evolution of the rings. While the motion of planetesimals is dominated by the gravity from the central star, the orbital evolution is affected by the viscous stirring and gas drag in the scope of this study. We investigated the evolution of planetesimal rings using N-body simulations. We focused on the orbital evolution of the rings, specifically the migration and diffusion of the rings, and the evolution of the orbital eccentricity and inclination of the rings’ planetesimals. We also investigated the dependence of orbital evolution on parameters by varying the initial parameters of the planetesimal rings. In this talk, I present evolution of these planetesimal rings shown for the first time by N-body simulations.