Dust in the Wind: Dynamics of Dusty Fluids on Interstellar, Stellar, and Planetary Scales

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

Dust grains are tiny particles, ranging from smog-like soots and microscopic sand-like grains to crystals, are of fundamental importance to almost all astrophysics. These grains contain a huge fraction of all the heavy elements in the Universe, and as such represent the "building blocks" that ultimately make up the planets and us. Astronomers have long known that dust is mixed with Hydrogen and Helium gas in the space between the planets, stars, and galaxies, but the dynamics of "dusty fluids" remain poorly understood. Understanding the interactions of dust grains is important models of "recycling" of material between stars and the gas between stars. To address these issues, the investigator will produce new, massively parallel, public computational codes. This software will also be applicable to more general engineering and turbulence/aerodynamic applications. The investigator plans summer research opportunities for undergraduates, high school students, and high school teachers. This work will also generate animations and visualizations for outreach programs, public talks, and planetarium shows. The investigator’s group has recently discovered previously unknown instabilities that can re-write much of the conventional wisdom about how dust grains change with time and alter the formation of planets and stars. Students will run computer simulations incorporating all the relevant processes to model these problems self-consistently and capture the behaviors of these instabilities. This is enabled by a new generation of massive computer codes the investigators have developed. These codes numerically solve the equations of fluid dynamics interacting with dust and magnetic fields and radiation. They will develop novel testable predictions for planetary disks, planet properties, variations of stars, and structure of the gas around stars This work should contribute fundamentally to our understanding how planets form, how stars change with time, and where stars and planets -- and our chemical building blocks -- come from. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.