Other
Scientific paper
Sep 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011ess.....2.0804m&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, ESS meeting #2, #8.04
Other
Scientific paper
Core accretion enjoys wide acceptance as the standard model of giant planet formation. However, traditional implementations of this model have difficulty generating gas giants at large stellocentric distances, where a core cannot grow quickly enough to accrete a gas envelope before the dispersal of its host disk. Direct imaging studies indicate that gas giants exist at wide separations, leading to speculation that another formation process, such as gravitational instability, may be at work. Here, we demonstrate that when embedded in a gas disk, planetary cores grow substantially faster than previously estimated, allowing core accretion to operate at large separations. In particular, we argue that a growing core can quickly accrete a population of small planetesimals that occupy orbits damped by gas. For a range of planetesimal sizes, these small bodies form a thin enough layer in the disk that fast accretion is possible, but nevertheless can decouple from the gas and accrete onto the core. This process of drag-mediated gravitational focusing leads to fast growth, rendering core accretion plausible out to distances at which directly imaged planets have been observed.
Kratter Kaitlin
Murray-Clay Ruth
Youdin Andrew
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