Other
Scientific paper
Oct 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008phdt.......292b&link_type=abstract
PhD Thesis, Observatoire de Paris
Other
1
Planetary Migration, Protoplanetary Discs, Hydrodynamics
Scientific paper
The detection over the past fifteen years of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, the exoplanets, has provided an exciting opportunity to test our theories of planet formation and evolution. An impressive result inferred from the observations is the significant proportion of exoplanets having a mass comparable to that of Jupiter, and located much closer to their star than Mercury is from our own Sun! These exoplanets, known as the Hot Jupiters, are probably built up from an solid core, so they are unlikely to have formed where they are detected. They should rather have formed further out in the disc, where temperatures are more favorable to their growth. One then needs to explain how planets could move closer to their host star.
Remarkably enough, such an explanation was proposed well before the discovery of the first exoplanet. It considered the interaction between a planet and the protoplanetary disc, which leads to a decrease of the planet's semi-major axis. Planets should progressively spiral toward their central star. This is known as planetary migration. Before the beginning of my thesis, many analytical and numerical studies have shown that the migration timescale of low-mass planets is much shorter than the lifetime of the protoplanetary disc. All planets should therefore have migrated to the vicinity of their host star! This is at least in contradiction with the locations of the planets in our Solar System.
In order to elaborate predictive scenarios of planet formation and evolution, it is of primary interest to refine our understanding of disc-planet interactions. The inclusion of the disc self-gravity is an illustration of this. With analytical and numerical arguments, we show that discarding the self-gravity leads to a significant overestimate of the differential Lindblad torque for migrating low-mass planets. Another aspect explored in this thesis is the impact of the gas thermodynamics on migration. We show that the thermodynamic evolution of the disc induces an additional contribution to the corotation torque, which may dramatically slow down or even reverse the migration of low-mass planets.
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