Dynamical friction in slab geometries and accretion disks

Rodrigo Vicente, Vitor Cardoso, Miguel Zilhão

Published 2019-05-15Version 1

The evolution of planets, stars and even galaxies is driven, to a large extent, by dynamical friction of gravitational origin. There is now a good understanding of the friction produced by extended media, either collisionless of fluid-like. However, the physics of accretion or protoplanetary disks, for instance, is described by slab-like geometries instead, compact in one spatial direction. Here, we find, for the first time, the gravitational wake due to a massive perturber moving through a slab-like medium, describing e.g. accretion disks with sharp transitions. We show that dynamical friction in such environments can be substantially reduced relatively to spatially extended profiles. Finally, we provide simple and accurate expressions for the gravitational drag force felt by the perturber, in both the subsonic and supersonic regime.