Combining a particle-particle, particle-cluster and cluster-cluster agglomeration model with an aggregate charging model, the coagulation and charging of dust particles in various plasma environments relevant for proto-planetary disks have been investigated. The results show that charged aggregates tend to grow by adding small particles and clusters to larger particles and clusters, leading to greater sizes and masses as compared to neutral aggregates, for the same number of monomers in the aggregate. In addition, aggregates coagulating in a Lorentzian plasma (containing a larger fraction of high-energy plasma particles) are more massive and larger than aggregates coagulating in a Maxwellian plasma, for the same plasma densities and characteristic temperature. Comparisons of the grain structure, utilizing the compactness factor, φ σ , demonstrate that a Lorentzian plasma environment results in fluffier aggregates, with small φ σ , which exhibit a narrow compactness factor distribution. Neutral aggregates are more compact, with larger φ σ , and exhibit a larger variation in fluffiness. Measurement of the compactness factor of large populations of aggregates is shown to provide information on the disk parameters that were present during aggregation.Subject headings: accretion disk -dust -planets and satellites: formation -plasmasprotoplanetary disks
The formation of planetsAt the time of writing more than 500 exoplanets have been observed with more than 400 of these confirmed, and more planets are being detected and confirmed on a weekly basis 1 . Even though these discoveries show that the process of planet formation is in itself a general one, they have also shown that our Solar System is everything but the perfect example of the average planetary system, Pluto, or no Pluto. Partly due to the inherent bias of the available observational techniques, many of the earliest discovered systems involved large gaseous planets orbiting close to the parent star and planets on very eccentric orbits, much in contrast with our Solar System (Ollivier et al. 2009). Since many early planet formation theories were based on the Solar System (and in many cases these were then tested against our Solar System), these observations make clear that our knowledge of planet formation is incomplete.The environment in which planet formation takes place is generally accepted to be a proto-planetary disk (PPD), a disk of gas and small (nanometer to millimeter sized) dust particulates accreting matter onto the central young stellar object (YSO), a famous 1 1http://www.exoplanets.org, http://www.exoplanet.eu