LOW-VELOCITY COLLISIONS OF CENTIMETER-SIZED DUST AGGREGATES

Collisions between centimeter- and decimeter-sized dusty bodies are important in understanding the mechanisms leading to the formation of planetesimals. We performed laboratory experiments to study the collisional behavior of dust aggregates in this size range at velocities below and around the fragmentation threshold. We developed two independent experimental setups with the same goal: to study the effects of bouncing, fragmentation, and mass transfer in free particle-particle collisions. The first setup is an evacuated drop tower with a free-fall height of 1.5 m, providing us with 0.56 s of microgravity time, so that we observed collisions with velocities between 8 mm s(-1) and 2 m s(-1). The second setup is designed to study the effect of partial fragmentation (when only one of the two aggregates is destroyed) and mass transfer in more detail. It allows for the measurement of the accretion efficiency because the samples are safely recovered after the encounter. At very low velocities, we found that bouncing was as expected, while the fragmentation velocity of 20 cm s(-1) was significantly lower than expected. We present the critical energy for disruptive collisions Q(star), which were at least two orders of magnitude lower than previous experiments in the literature. In the wide range between bouncing and disruptive collisions, only one of the samples fragmented in the encounter, while the other gained mass. The accretion efficiency on the order of a few percentage points of the particle's mass depends on the impact velocity and the sample porosity. Our results will have consequences for dust evolution models in protoplanetary disks as well as for the strength of large, porous planetesimal bodies.