arXiv subjects

Jean-François Gonzalez

Publications and source records attributed to Jean-François Gonzalez.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Reflex instabilities I: Boundaries makes grid-based disc simulations frame-dependent

If the mass distribution within an accretion disc is asymmetric, it will exert a gravitational pull on its central object. The central object must then move away from the origin of the reference frame, resulting in atypical gravitational pulls on the disc. The goal of the present series of papers is to investigate the stability of this feedback loop. In this first paper, we report a surprising finding: the choice of reference frame affects the number and nature of the waves and instabilities contained in the analytical equations. To show this, we use a simple example: the modes discovered by Sanchez et al. (2025, Appendix A.3). We provide the first analytical description of those modes, we explain their physical mechanism, and propose to call them 'bracket modes' because they arise from the bracket side of an integration by parts. We show that the same disc can be stable in the stellocentric reference frame but unstable in the barycentric reference frame. This is because the boundaries of the simulation domain are frame-dependent. To avoid this, one must model the entire disc all the way from the central cavity to the outer edge. But this is prohibitively expensive, and some discs do not have a central cavity anyway. Our results suggest that extreme caution is required when interpreting simulations of asymmetric discs, and that our community may not have the tools to model the reflex motion of the central object yet.

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arXiv2026

Reflex instabilities II: The reflex motion of the central object drives at least seven instabilities in accretion discs

This series of papers studies the stability of accretion discs to the reflex motion of the central object under the gravitational pull of the disc itself. In this second paper, we use linear analysis to reproduce or discover seven distinct instabilities. We outline their defining characteristics and propose a classification. Of the four instabilities that had already been discovered, three are artificial: one does not survive the transition to modern surface density profiles such as power-laws, one is due to the location of the domain's boundaries, and one is due to the use of damping layers near the domain's boundaries. Only the SLING instability of Adams et al. (1989) and the three new 'cavity' instabilities seem capable of affecting accretion discs. All four can be described to a high degree of precision by WKB methods. They may drive eccentricity growth, affect planet migration, create spiral and crescent substructures in the absence of any planet, and boost accretion onto the central object. The issue is that the three artificial instabilities are extremely hard to avoid in simulations, and would bias the same observables. This suggests that our community may not have the tools to model the reflex motion of the central object yet.

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arXiv2026

From spirals to rings: dust dynamics in gravitoturbulent protoplanetary discs after late infall

Substructures appear to be a common trait of all extended protoplanetary discs. They are found notably in discs still surrounded by ambient, possibly infalling material. In this study, we revisit the observational signatures of gravitational instability (GI) in the dust and gas emission of protoplanetary discs. We focus on discs undergoing a short-lived episode of late infall that triggers spirals via GI, in order to investigate the long-term dynamics of millimetre-sized dust. We performed 2D hydrodynamical simulations modelling gas and millimetre-sized dust in a self-gravitating disc, with a simplified treatment of stellar irradiation and infall. Results were post-processed by 3D radiative transfer calculations. During infall, GI sets in and the disc develops a gravitoturbulent state characterised by the continuous formation of spirals. Shortly after infall ends, the millimetre-sized dust remains well coupled to the gas, and the dust emission exhibits large-scale spirals in both near-infrared scattered light and continuum emission. Even long after infall has ceased, two-armed spirals are persistently excited by GI in specific regions of the disc. Their dissipation entails the formation of multiple long-lasting pressure maxima, which can be viewed as vestiges of shocks induced by the spirals. They form persistent dust rings that are more or less axisymmetrical. Consequently, once late infall ends, a massive disc can gradually evolve from a disc with spirals in the continuum into one featuring multiple, potentially lopsided bright rings in the continuum. In near-infrared scattered light, the disc initially displays multiple spirals during infall or shortly after it ceases, before ultimately exhibiting multiple rings. The persistent excitation of spirals implies, however, that the residual line-of-sight velocity, derived from line emission, shows large-scale spirals across the disc.

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arXiv2026

Dust Growth in Binary Systems: Inhibition of dust settling and growth in circumbinary discs

Stellar multiplicity alters the density structure of protoplanetary discs and thereby the initial conditions for planet formation. Yet, the interplay between companion-disc interactions and dust growth remains poorly understood. The goal of this work is to investigate to what extent the density structure of a disc undergoing tidal interactions with a companion star promotes or inhibits the growth of dust grains. We perform a set of hydrodynamical simulations of protoplanetary discs orbiting one or both stars of a binary, including dust growth and fragmentation. We explore a range of companion orbits and compare the results with a single-star reference case. We find that dust growth is mainly driven by local accumulations of dust. In circumbinary discs, the maximum grain size is up to five times smaller than in isolated discs. This result likely originates from the perturbations caused by the inner binary, which prevent dust grains from properly settling and drifting. As a consequence, the conditions required to trigger strong clumping driven by the streaming instability are difficult to achieve. In contrast, circumstellar discs in binary systems exhibit grain sizes similar to those in isolated discs, leading to comparable conditions for strong clumping by the streaming instability. Planet formation through core accretion seems challenging in circumbinary discs harbouring binaries larger than a few au, suggesting that circumbinary planets observed near the dynamical stability limit did not form in situ. Conversely, perturbations from external companions only marginally affect density-driven dust growth compared to isolated systems.

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arXiv2026

SF2A Environmental Transition Commission: Chosen pieces from the survey 'French astronomy and astrophysics research activities in the face of the environmental crisis, from 2019 to 2024'

In 2025, the French Society for Astronomy \& Astrophysics (SF2A), gave the environmental transition commission the opportunity to share their considerations during a plenary session at the annual SF2A conference. This year, the presentation focused on some of the main results obtained from the survey entitled 'French astronomy and astrophysics research activities in the face of the environmental crisis, from 2019 to 2024'. The survey was initiated in 2019 by the group 'Environnement-Transition' (coordinated by P. Martin) at IRAP, whose results were presented during the SF2A annual conference 2019 in Nice. The survey was updated in 2024 by the CNRS INSU-AA prospective working group 'Climate and ecological challenge' (coordinated by S. Bontemp). The SF2A environmental transition commission took on the survey to the French institutes, sorted the answers and extracted the preliminary results. The full results will be published at the end of 2025 in the final CNRS INSU-AA 2024 prospective document. This publication presents a selection of pieces from the full survey, along with a few of the main discussions it triggers.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2026

SF2A Environmental Transition Commission: Summary of the 2025 workshop

During its annual conference in 2025, the French Society of Astronomy \& Astrophysics (SF2A) hosted, for the fifth time, a special session dedicated to discussing the environmental transition within the French A\&A research community. During the 2025 workshop, the goal was to review four contemporary topics within the context of environmental transition actions and discussions: (1) institutional actions, (2) the early-career researchers singularity, (3) research infrastructures and tools, and (4) the geopolitical conditions under which A\&A research remains possible. The workshop concluded with a round-table discussion that brought together the various speakers so that every participant could express their ideas.

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arXiv2026

The CO snow line favours strong clumping by the streaming instability in protoplanetary discs with porous grains

Context: The radial drift and fragmentation of small dust grains in protoplanetary discs impedes their growth past centimetre sizes. Several mechanisms have been proposed to overcome these planet formation barriers, such as dust porosity or the streaming instability (SI), which is today regarded as the most promising mechanism to form planetesimals. Aims: Here, we examine whether the conditions for the SI to lead to strong clumping, the first step in planetesimal formation, are realised in protoplanetary discs containing porous grains. Methods: We used results from previous simulations of the evolution of porous grains subjected to growth, fragmentation, compaction and bouncing in protoplanetary discs. In the ensuing disc structures, we determined the regions where the dust-to-gas ratio exceeds the critical value for strong clumping found in simulations of the SI including external turbulence. Results: We find that the conditions for strong clumping are met within the first hundred thousand years in large regions of protoplanetary discs containing porous grains, provided that the CO snow line is taken into account. If the CO snow line is neglected, the conditions are met only very close to the inner disc edge early on, or over large areas well after 200,000 yr.

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arXiv2025

The reflex instability: exponential growth of a large-scale $m=1$ mode in astrophysical discs

We report the finding of a linear, non-axisymmetric, global instability in gas discs around stars, which may be relevant to other astrophysical discs. It takes the form of an $m=1$ mode that grows in the disc density distribution while the star-barycentre distance rises exponentially with a characteristic timescale that is orders of magnitude longer than the orbital period. We present results of hydrodynamical simulations with various codes and numerical methods, using either barycentric or stellocentric reference frames, with or without the disc's self gravity: all simulations consistently show an unstable mode growing exponentially. The instability disappears if, and only if, the reflex motion of the star due to the disc's asymmetry is not taken into account in the simulations. For this reason we refer to this instability as the reflex instability. We identify a feedback loop as a possible origin, whereby the acceleration of the star excites the eccentricity of the disc, yielding an $m=1$ mode in the density distribution which, in turn, pulls the star. The growth timescale of the instability decreases with increasing disc mass and is a few hundred orbits for disc-to-star mass ratios of a few percent. If truly physical, and not due to a numerical artifact that would be common to all the codes we have employed, the reflex instability could have a dramatic impact on protoplanetary discs evolution and planetary formation.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2025

On inertial forces (indirect terms) in problems with a central body

Gravitational systems in astrophysics often comprise a body -- the primary -- that far outweights the others, and which is taken as the centre of the reference frame. A fictitious acceleration, also known as the indirect term, must therefore be added to all other bodies in the system to compensate for the absence of motion of the primary. In this paper, we first stress that there is not one indirect term but as many indirect terms as there are bodies in the system that exert a gravitational pull on the primary. For instance, in the case of a protoplanetary disc with two planets, there are three indirect terms: one arising from the whole disc, and one per planet. We also highlight that the direct and indirect gravitational accelerations should be treated in a balanced way: the indirect term from one body should be applied to the other bodies in the system that feel its direct gravitational acceleration, and only to them. We point to situations where one of those terms is usually neglected however, which may lead to spurious results. These ideas are developed here for star-disc-planets interactions, for which we propose a recipe for the force to be applied onto a migrating planet, but they can easily be generalized to other astrophysical systems.

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arXiv2024

Compaction during fragmentation and bouncing produces realistic dust grain porosities in protoplanetary discs

Context: In protoplanetary discs, micron-sized dust grows to form millimetre- to centimetre-sized pebbles but encounters several barriers during its evolution. Collisional fragmentation and radial drift impede further dust growth to planetesimal size. Fluffy grains have been hypothesised to solve these problems. While porosity leads to faster grain growth, the implied porosity values obtained from previous simulations were larger than suggested by observations. Aims: In this paper, we study the influence of porosity on dust evolution taking into account growth, bouncing, fragmentation, compaction, rotational disruption and snow lines, in order to understand their impact on dust evolution. Methods: We develop a module for porosity evolution for the 3D Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code Phantom that accounts for dust growth and fragmentation. This mono-disperse model is integrated into both a 1D code and the 3D code to capture the overall evolution of dust and gas. Results: We show that porosity helps dust growth and leads to the formation of larger solids than when considering compact grains, as predicted by previous work. Our simulations taking into account compaction during fragmentation show that large millimetre grains are still formed, but are 10 to 100 times more compact. Thus, mm sizes with typical filling factors of ~0.1 match the values measured on comets or via polarimetric observations of protoplanetary discs.

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arXiv2024

Aeolian erosion in protoplanetary discs: How impactful it is on dust evolution?

Context: Many barriers prevent dust to form planetesimals via coagulation in protoplanetary discs, such as bouncing, collisional fragmentation or aeolian erosion. Modelling dust and the different phenomena that can alter its evolution is therefore needed. Multiple solutions have been proposed, but still need to be confirmed. Aims: In this paper, we explore the role aeolian erosion plays in the evolution of dust. Methods: We use a monodisperse model to account for dust growth and fragmentation, implemented in a 1D model to compute the evolution of single grains and a 3D SPH code to compute the global evolution of dust and gas. We test the erosion model in our code and ensured it matches previous results. Results: With a model of disc reproducing observations, we show with both 1D and 3D studies that erosion is not significant during the evolution of dust when we take fragmentation into consideration. With a low-viscosity disc, fragmentation is less of a problem, but grain growth is also less important, preventing the formation of large objects anyway. In dust traps, close to the star, erosion is also not impactful, even when fragmentation is turned off. Conclusions: We show in this paper that aeolian erosion is negligible when radial drift, fragmentation and dust traps are taken into account and does not alter the dust evolution in the disc. However, it can have an impact on later stages, i.e. when the streaming instability forms large clumps close to the star, or when planetesimals are captured.

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arXiv2023

WInDI: a Warp-Induced Dust Instability in protoplanetary discs

We identify a new dust instability that occurs in warped discs. The instability is caused by the oscillatory gas motions induced by the warp in the bending wave regime. We first demonstrate the instability using a local 1D (vertical) toy model based on the warped shearing box coordinates and investigate the effects of the warp magnitude and dust Stokes number on the growth of the instability. We then run 3D SPH simulations and show that the instability is manifested globally by producing unique dust structures that do not correspond to gas pressure maxima. The 1D and SPH analysis suggest that the instability grows on dynamical timescales and hence is potentially significant for planet formation.

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arXiv2023

Dynamical detection of a companion driving a spiral arm in a protoplanetary disk

Radio and near-infrared observations have observed dozens of protoplanetary disks that host spiral arm features. Numerical simulations have shown that companions may excite spiral density waves in protoplanetary disks via companion-disk interaction. However, the lack of direct observational evidence for spiral-driving companions poses challenges to current theories of companion-disk interaction. Here we report multi-epoch observations of the binary system HD 100453 with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) facility at the Very Large Telescope. By recovering the spiral features via robustly removing starlight contamination, we measure spiral motion across 4 yr to perform dynamical motion analyses. The spiral pattern motion is consistent with the orbital motion of the eccentric companion. With this first observational evidence of a companion driving a spiral arm among protoplanetary disks, we directly and dynamically confirm the long-standing theory on the origin of spiral features in protoplanetary disks. With the pattern motion of companion-driven spirals being independent of companion mass, here we establish a feasible way of searching for hidden spiral-arm-driving planets that are beyond the detection of existing ground-based high-contrast imagers.

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arXiv2023

Dust grain shattering in protoplanetary discs: collisional fragmentation or rotational disruption?

In protoplanetary discs, the coagulation of dust grains into large aggregates still remains poorly understood. Grain porosity appears to be a promising solution to allow the grains to survive and form planetesimals. Furthermore, dust shattering has generally been considered to come only from collisional fragmentation; however, a new process was recently introduced, rotational disruption. We wrote a one-dimensional code that models the growth and porosity evolution of grains as they drift to study their final outcome when the two shattering processes are included. When simulating the evolution of grains in a disc model that reproduces observations, we find that rotational disruption is not negligible compared to the fragmentation and radial drift. Disruption becomes dominant when the turbulence parameter $α\lesssim 5\xtenpow{-4}$, if the radial drift is slow enough. We show that the importance of disruption in the growth history of grains strongly depends on their tensile strength.

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arXiv2021

Dust Traffic Jams in Inclined Circumbinary Protoplanetary Discs I. Morphology and Formation Theory

Gas and dust in inclined orbits around binaries experience precession induced by the binary gravitational torque. The difference in precession between gas and dust alters the radial drift of weakly coupled dust and leads to density enhancements where the radial drift is minimised. We explore this phenomenon using 3D hydrodynamical simulations to investigate the prominence of these `dust traffic jams' and the evolution of the resulting dust sub-structures at different disc inclinations and binary eccentricities. We then derive evolution equations for the angular momentum of warped dust discs and implement them in a 1D code and present calculations to further explain these traffic jams. We find that dust traffic jams in inclined circumbinary discs provide significant dust density enhancements that are long lived and can have important consequences for planetesimal formation.

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arXiv2021

Dust growth, fragmentation and self-induced dust traps in PHANTOM

We present the implementation of a dust growth and fragmentation module in the public Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code PHANTOM. This module is made available for public use with this paper. The coagulation model considers locally monodisperse dust size distributions around single values that are carried by the SPH particles. Along with the presentation of the model, implementation and tests, we showcase growth and fragmentation in a few typical circumstellar disc simulations and revisit previous results. The module is also interfaced with the radiative transfer code MCFOST, which facilitates the comparison between simulations and ALMA observations by generating synthetic maps. Circumstellar disc simulations with growth and fragmentation reproduce the `self-induced dust trap' mechanism first proposed by Gonzalez et al., which supports its existence. Synthetic images of discs featuring this mechanism suggest it would be detectable by ALMA as a bright axisymmetric ring at several tens of au from the star. With this paper, our aim is to provide a public tool to be able to study and explore dust growth in a variety of applications related to planet formation.

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arXiv2021

Dust Traps and the Formation of Cavities in Transition Discs: A millimetre to sub-millimetre comparison survey

The origin of the inner dust cavities observed in transition discs remains unknown. The segregation of dust and size of the cavity is expected to vary depending on which clearing mechanism dominates grain evolution. We present the results from the Discs Down Under program, an 8.8 mm continuum Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) survey targeting 15 transition discs with large (> 20 au) cavities, and compare the resulting dust emission to Atacama Large millimetre/sub-millimetre Array (ALMA) observations. Our ATCA observations resolve the inner cavity for 8 of the 14 detected discs. We fit the visibilities and reconstruct 1D radial brightness models for 10 sources with a S/N > 5sigma. We find that, for sources with a resolved cavity in both wavebands, the 8.8 mm and sub-mm brightness distributions peak at the same radius from the star. We suggest that a similar cavity size for 8.8 mm and sub-mm dust grains is due to a dust trap induced by the presence of a companion.

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arXiv2020

Spirals, shadows & precession in HD 100453 -- II. The hidden companion

The protoplanetary disc HD 100453 exhibits a curious combination of spirals, shadows and a relative misalignment between the observed outer disc and inferred inner disc. This disc is accompanied by a secondary star on a bound orbit exterior to the disc. Recent observations have suggested there may be an additional low-mass companion residing within the disc inner cavity. In our companion paper the orbit of the secondary was shown to be misaligned by 61 degrees to the plane of the outer disc. Here we investigate the properties of the inner companion and the origin of the misalignment between the inner and outer disc. Using numerical simulations and synthetic observations, we show that the disc structure and kinematics are consistent with a $\lesssim$ 5 Jupiter mass planet located at 15-20au. We find that the disc evolution over around 50 binary orbits (about 10$^5$ yrs) is governed by differential precession and to a lesser extent, the Kozai-Lidov effect. In our proposed model the misalignment observed between the outer and inner disc arises naturally as a result of the misaligned outer companion driving the outer disc to precess more rapidly than the inner disc.

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