Simulations of dust aggregates through collisions

Mass transfer through highly different-sized collisions has been suggested to be a way to circumvent the disruption barrier. We examine how the collisional growth efficiency of dust aggregates at different impact parameters depends on the size and the mass-ratio of colliding aggregates.

We use an N-body code to numerically simulate the collisions of different-sized aggregates. Our results show that large values of the impact parameter are important and the growth efficiency averaged over the impact parameter does not depend on the aggregate size although the growth efficiency for nearly head-on collisions increases with size. We also find that the averaged growth efficiency tends to increase with increasing the mass-ratio of colliding aggregates.