When a giant planet forms in a protoplanetary disks, it carves a gap around its orbit separating the disk into two parts: an inner disk and an outer disk. Traditional disk accretion models, which assume material transport is driven by viscosity, reveal that the planet-induced gap acts like a filter which blocks large dust grains from flowing into the inner disk. However, there is growing evidence that material transport may be driven by magnetically driven winds instead. By carrying out a suite of two-dimensional multifluid hydrodynamic simulations where wind is implemented with a parameterized model, we explore how dust filtration efficiency and the size of dust grains filtered change in disks where gas accretion is dominated by magnetically driven winds. We find that the inward gas flow driven by the wind can enable dust to overcome the pressure bump at the outer gap edge and penetrate the planet-induced gap. The maximum size of dust grains capable of penetrating the gap increases with wind strength. Notably, we found that when wind is strong (mass-loss rate = 10 −7 M ⊙ yr −1 ), millimeter-sized grains can penetrate the gap opened by a multi-Jovian-mass planet. Our results suggest that magnetically driven winds can significantly enhance pebble drift and impact planet formation in the inner protoplanetary disk.
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Nicholson et al. (2025) studied this question.
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