Planets in turbulent Disks

Abstract

Planets form in protoplanetary accretion disks around young protostars. These disks are driven by internal turbulence and the gas flow is in general not laminar but has stochastic components. For weakly ionized disks the turbulence can be generated purely hydrodynamically through the vertical shear instability (VSI). Planets, that are forming in such turbulent disks, experience random components in the torques acting on them, that will modify their migration behaviour. In this contribution we present results of our study of the impact that a turbulent disk has on an embedded planet. For that purpose we performed three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of a locally isothermal disk with embedded planets of various masses. For the lower mass planets (5 and 10 M ) we find that the inward migration rate can be faster than in the laminar case, while for the more massive planets (30 and 100 M ) the results agree well with the laminar results.