On dynamical friction in a gaseous medium with a boundary

Understand

Dynamical friction arises from the interaction of a perturber and the gravitational wake it excites in the ambient medium.

• We study the effects of the presence of a boundary on dynamical friction by studying analytically the interaction of perturber with uniform rectilinear motion in a uniform homogeneous medium with a reflecting planar boundary.
• Wake reflection at a medium's boundary may occur at the edges of truncated disks perturbed by planetary or stellar companions as well as in numerical simulations of planet-disk interaction with no-outflow boundary conditions.
• In this paper, we show that the presence of the boundary modifies the behaviour of dynamical friction significantly.