Young stars are known to host a disk of dust and gas around them, from which planets can form. High-resolution observations of dust in such planet-forming disks have shown a variety of structures, including rings, gaps and crescents. The leading explanation for these structures is dust-trapping in a local gas pressure maximum, caused by an embedded planet or other dynamical process. Independent of origin, such dust traps should be stable for many orbits to collect significant dust. However, ring-like perturbations in gas disks are also known to trigger the Rossby Wave Instability (RWI). In this talk, I investigate when axisymmetric pressure bumps can simultaneously trap dust and remain stable to the RWI. Based on linear stability analysis, I present a method (and its simple, approximate version) that can support or rule out the dust trap hypothesis, depending on the properties of the observed gas pressure maximum.

The speaker will be in-person!