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J. Koller, H. Li (LANL)
The ongoing discoveries of extrasolar planets in the recent years revealed remarkable properties and unexpected results concerning the formation process. We studied the perturbation of a protostellar accretion disk by a companion utilizing APOLLO, a fast hydro disk code well tested in the case of accretion disks without a companion (Li et al. 2001, ApJ, 551, 874). We consider limiting cases where the companion's mass is much smaller than the central protostar and resides in a circular keplerian orbit. The gravitational field of the protoplanet, embedded in a numerically thin disk, generates spiral density waves and Rossby instabilities resulting in a non-axisymmetric density distribution.
We present nonlinear hydro simulations to investigate those non-axisymmetric density distribution with different disk and planet parameters in order to understand how disks respond to a fixed companion in orbit.
This work has been supported by IGPP at LANL (award # 1109) and NASA (grant # NAG5-9223).
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.