Secular Gravitational Instability of Drifting Dust in Protoplanetary Disks: Formation of Dusty Rings without Significant Gas Substructures

Secular gravitational instability (GI) is one promising mechanism for creating annular substructures and planetesimals in protoplanetary disks. We perform numerical simulations of secular GI in a radially extended disk with inwardly drifting dust grains. The results show that, even in the presence of dust diffusion, dust rings form via secular GI while the dust grains are moving inward, and the dust surface density increases by a factor of 10. Once secular GI develops into a nonlinear regime, the total mass of the resultant rings can be a significant fraction of the dust disk mass. In this way, a large amount of drifting dust grains can be collected in the dusty rings and stored for planetesimal formation. In contrast to the emergence of remarkable dust substructures, secular GI does not create significant gas substructures. This result indicates that observations of a gas density profile near the disk midplane enable us to distinguish the mechanisms for creating the annular substructures in the observed disks. The resultant rings start decaying once they enter the inner region stable to secular GI. Because the ring-gap contrast smoothly decreases, it seems possible that the rings are observed even in the stable region. We also discuss the likely outcome of the nonlinear growth and indicate the possibility that a significantly developed region of secular GI may appear as a gap-like substructure in dust continuum emission as dust growth into larger solid bodies and planetesimal formation reduce the total emissivity.