When Do Planets Form? The Search for Extrasolar Planets Around Metal-Poor Stars

Details When Do Planets Form? The Search for Extrasolar Planets Around Metal-Poor Stars When Do Planets Form? The Search for Extrasolar Planets Around Metal-Poor Stars

May 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003aas...202.3403s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 202, #34.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 35, p.748

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

To date, one of the fundamental questions about the origin/nature of planetary systems still remains unanswered: Do gas giant planets form by core accretion or disk instability? Among the two proposed mechanisms for gas giant planet formation, core accretion is likely to be enhanced in metal-rich stars, as increased surface densities of solids can shorten the overall time-scales for giant planet formation by this mechanism, while disk instability is remarkably insensitive to the primordial metallicity of the protoplanetary disk. Very few metal-poor stars have been searched for planets so far, and the implication that there may be no planets orbiting field metal-poor stars simply has not been tested yet. In fact, the absence of very close-in (P < 8.3 days) planets in the moderately metal-poor ([Fe/H] ˜ -0.7) globular cluster 47 Tuc may be due to a lack of planet formation because of the low metallicity. Alternatively, the dense stellar environment in the cluster may have interfered with planet formation, or with migration to close-in orbits, or with planet survival. By conducting a search for planets around a sample of nearby metal-poor dwarfs in the field, where the stellar density is much lower, dynamical interactions in a dense stellar environment can be eliminated as a factor, and it will be possible to unambiguously determine the role of metallicity in gas giant planet formation.
Here we present preliminary results from our search for planets within 1 AU around a well-controlled sample of metal-poor stars using the Keck 1 telescope.
A. S. is greatly indebted to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for support through the SAO Predoctoral Fellowship program and to the University of Pittsburgh for support through the Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship program.

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