2023ApJ...946...94X

Recent observations suggest that the first stages of planet formation likely take place in the Class 0/I phase of young stellar object evolution, when the star and the disk are still embedded in an infalling envelope. In this study we perform grain coagulation calculations to investigate the very first stage of planet formation, the collisional growth of dust grains, in Class 0/I disks. We find that the slow increase in grain mass by high-velocity collision with much smaller grains (“sweep-up”) allows ∼50 M_⊕ of grains to grow well beyond the fragmentation barrier into ∼kilogram pebbles by the end of Class 0/I (0.1 Myr). We analyze the linear growth and saturation of sweep-up to understand our results quantitatively, and test whether the sweep-up outcome is sensitive to disk parameters and details of the grain coagulation model. The sweep-up pebble population could be important for planet formation, because they are less well-coupled to the gas (compared to the main population below the fragmentation barrier) and therefore more favorable to known mechanisms of dust clump formation (which initiate planetesimal formation). It also contains enough mass to form all planet cores, based on observational estimates of the planet mass budget. Our findings motivate future studies of grain growth and planetesimal formation in Class 0/I disks, including the subsequent evolution of this sweep-up population.