A revised condition for self-gravitational fragmentation of protoplanetary discs

Abstract

Fragmentation of protoplanetary discs due to gravitational instabilities is a candidate of a formation mechanism of binary stars, brown dwarfs, and gaseous giant planets. The condition for the fragmentation has been thought that the disc cooling time-scale is comparable to its dynamical time-scale. However, some numerical simulations suggest that the fragmentation does not occur even if the cooling time is small enough, or the fragmentation can occur even when the cooling is inefficient. To reveal a realistic condition for fragmentation of self-gravitating discs, we perform two-dimensional numerical simulations that take into account the effect of the irradiation of the central star and radiation cooling of the disc, and precisely investigate the structure of the spiral arms formed in the protoplanetary discs. We show that the Toomre Q parameter in the spiral arms is an essential parameter for fragmentation. The spiral arms fragment only when Q < 0.6 in the spiral arms. We have further confirmed that this fragmentation condition observed in the numerical simulations can be obtained from the linear stability analysis for the self-gravitating spiral arms. These results indicate that the process of fragmentation of protoplanetary discs is divided into two stages: formation of the spiral arms in the discs; and fragmentation of the spiral arm. Our work reduces the condition for the fragmentation of the protoplanetary discs to the condition of the formation of the spiral arm that satisfies Q < 0.6.