A Comoving Framework for Planet Migration

Abstract

The migration of planets within their nascent protoplanetary disks is a fundamental process that shapes the final architecture of planetary systems. However, studying this phenomenon through direct hydrodynamical simulations is computationally demanding, with traditional methods on fixed grids being ill-suited for tracking planet migration over long timescales due to their high cost and limited domain. In this work, we present a self-consistent comoving framework designed to overcome these challenges. Our method employs a coordinate transformation that scales with the planet's evolving semi-major axis, keeping the planet stationary with respect to its local computational grid. This transforms the standard hydrodynamic equations by introducing a source term that accounts for the inertial forces of the non-inertial reference frame. We implement this framework in the FARGO3D code and validate it through a benchmark test, demonstrating excellent agreement with conventional fixed-grid simulations until the latter are compromised by boundary effects. Our analysis shows that, for long-range migration scenarios, the comoving method can be over an order of magnitude more computationally efficient, dramatically reducing the cost of simulating migrating planets and making secular timescale simulations computationally feasible. This framework serves as both a powerful numerical and theoretical tool, simplifying the time-dependent flow around a migrating planet that offers clearer physical insight. It enables long-term, self-consistent studies of planet-disk interaction, representing a crucial step towards performing planet-population synthesis based on full hydrodynamical simulations.