The turbulence in baroclinic disks draws energy from the background shear, transports angular momentum outward and creates a radially inward bound accretion of matter, thus forming a self consistent process. Gravitational energy is transformed into turbulent kinetic energy, which is then dissipated, as in the classical accretion paradigm. We demonstrate in a global simulation that these vortices tend to form out of little background noise and to be long-lasting features, which have already been suggested to lead to the formation of planets. This is a short movie on the velocity pattern in the r-phi plane of the disk. One sees the interaction of irregular waves, typical for geostrophic turbulence.
Colours are densities, vectors are velocities in the local rotation frame.
We remove the vertical structure and radiation transport, but mimic the entropy gradient with a suited polytrop. But this time we model the radiation transport with a vertical disk atmosphere model. This is a 3D Simulation with radiation transport without any artificial heating.