The Irradiation Instability of Protoplanetary Disks.

The temperature in most parts of a protoplanetary disk is determined by irradiation from the central star. Numerical experiments of Watanabe & Lin (2008) suggested that such disks, also called `passive disks', suffer from a thermal instability. Here, we use analytical and numerical tools to reveal the nature of this instability. We find that it is related to the flaring of the optical surface, the layer at which starlight is intercepted by the disk. Whenever a disk annulus is perturbed thermally and acquires a larger scale height, disk flaring becomes steeper in the inner part, and flatter in the outer part. Starlight now shines more overhead for the inner part and can penetrate into deeper layers; conversely, it is absorbed more shallowly in the outer part. These geometric changes allow the annulus to intercept more starlight, and the perturbation grows. We call this the irradiation instability. It requires only ingredients known to exist in realistic disks (stellar illumination, optically thick), and operates best in parts that are very optically thick (inside 20 AU, but can extend to further reaches when, e.g., dust settling is considered). An unstable disk develops travelling thermal waves that reach order-unity in amplitude. In thermal radiation, such a disk should appear as a series of bright rings interleaved with dark shadowed gaps, while in scattered light it resembles a moving staircase. Depending on the gas and dust responses, this instability could lead to a wide range of interesting consequences, such as dust traps, vertical circulation, vortices and turbulence.