Gas-Assisted Capture of Earth-sized Moons around Extrasolar Giant Planets

Details Gas-Assisted Capture of Earth-sized Moons around Extrasolar Giant Planets Gas-Assisted Capture of Earth-sized Moons around Extrasolar Giant Planets

Nov 2001

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001dps....33.1508w&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS Meeting #33, #15.08; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 33, p.1060

Biology

Scientific paper

Today nearly 20 Jupiter-sized planets are known to orbit within or near the habitable zones of their parent stars [see Williams D.W. and Pollard, D. 2001. submitted Inter. J. Astrobiology]. Some of these planets might support life on their moons if their moons are able to form and hold onto sizeable atmospheres. Moons larger than 0.2 Mearth should have little trouble holding their atmospheres for billions of years [Williams D.W., Kasting, J.F., & Wade R.A. 1997. Nature 385,234]. But forming moons of this size through pair-wise accretion of small bodies in low-mass circum-planetary nebulas may be difficult; Ganymede (0.03 Mearth) was the largest moon to form out of a circum-planetary nebula in the Solar System. A more plausible scenario is for giant moons to be captured through collision of an earth-sized planetary body with a gaseous proto-planetary disk around a giant planet, as is thought to have occurred to form Triton around Neptune [McKinnon, W.B., & Leith, A.C. 1995. Icarus 118,392]. Such collisions can remove enormous amounts of energy from the impacting body and often result in a bound satellite on a near-circular orbit. Here we demonstrate that for a reasonable set of nebula parameters such captured moons can avoid spiraling into their planets on timescales comparable to or greater than the lifetime of a circum-planetary nebula.

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