Slowly-growing gap-opening planets trigger weaker vortices

Slowly-growing gap-opening planets trigger weaker vortices

Authors:

Hammer et al

Abstract:

The presence of a giant planet in a low-viscosity disc can create a gap edge in the disc's radial density profile sharp enough to excite the Rossby Wave Instability. This instability may evolve into dust-trapping vortices that might explain the "banana-shaped" features in recently observed asymmetric transition discs with inner cavities. Previous hydrodynamical simulations of planet-induced vortices have neglected the timescale of hundreds to thousands of orbits to grow a massive planet to Jupiter-size. In this work, we study the effect of a giant planet's runaway growth timescale on the lifetime and characteristics of the resulting vortex. For two different planet masses (1 and 5 Jupiter masses) and two different disc viscosities (α=3×10−4 and 3×10−5), we compare the vortices induced by planets with several different growth timescales between 10 and 4000 planet orbits. In general, we find that slowly-growing planets create significantly weaker vortices with lifetimes and surface densities reduced by more than 50%. For the higher disc viscosity, the longest growth timescales in our study inhibit vortex formation altogether. Additionally, slowly-growing planets produce vortices that are up to twice as elongated, with azimuthal extents well above 180∘ in some cases. These unique, elongated vortices likely create a distinct signature in the dust observations that differentiates them from the more concentrated vortices that correspond to planets with faster growth timescales. We find that the low viscosities necessary for vortex formation likely prevent planets from growing quickly enough to trigger the instability in self-consistent models.