Numerical Simulation of Protoplanetary Vortices

Abstract

The fluid dynamics within a protoplanetary disk has been attracting the attention of many researchers for a few decades. Previous works include, to list only a few among many others, the well-known alpha-prescription of Shakura & Sunyaev (1973), the convective and instability study of Stone & Balbus (1996) and Hawley et al. (1999), the Rossby wave approach of Lovelace et al (1999), as well as a recent work by Klahr & Bodenheimer (2003), which attempted to identify turbulent flow within the disk. The disk is commonly understood to be a thin gas disk rotating around a central star with differential rotation (the Keplerian velocity), and the central quest remains as how the flow behavior deviates (albeit by a small amount) from a strong balance established between gravitational and centrifugal forces, transfers mass and momentum inward, and eventually forms planetesimals and planets.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADP014794

Entities

People

  • Haibo Lin
  • J. A. Barranco
  • P. S. Marcus

Organizations

  • University of California, Berkeley

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Angular Momentum
  • Base Flow
  • Boundaries
  • Centrifugal Force
  • Convection
  • Equations
  • Flow
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Gaussian Distributions
  • Gravity Waves
  • Momentum
  • Radiation
  • Rossby Waves
  • Three Dimensional
  • Turbulence
  • Waves

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Astronomy/Astrophysics
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Educational Psychology