Planets are made from planetesimals, themselves made from tiny dust particles immersed in gaseous accretion disks around young stars. Thus, understanding dust dynamics in these protoplanetary disks is crucial to planet formation theory. However, coupling particle and gas dynamics is a challenging task for both numerical and analytical studies.
To circumvent this difficulty, we develop a physical and mathematical analogy between dusty gas and pure gas dynamics. This link allows us to model dust dynamics in protoplanetary disks using effectively the same equations as those for standard hydrodynamics. We can thus understand dusty gas phenomena in the language of textbooks; and also find new, dusty analogs of pure gas phenomena in protoplanetary disks.
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