Direct Simulations of Growth from 1 km Planetesimals at 0.4 AU

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

We present results of N-body simulations of planetesimal accretion beginning with 1 km-sized particles in orbit about a 1 solar mass star at 0.4 AU. Such particles may be the fundamental building blocks of terrestrial planets. This initial disk of planetesimals contains far too many bodies for any current N-body code to integrate, and we therefore only model a sample patch of the disk. Although this greatly reduces the number of bodies, our principal simulation still tracks over 100,000 particles in this manner. We consider several plausible initial conditions and monitor the growth of these particles. Our simulations use the perfect accretion model; planetesimal collisions are assumed to be completely inelastic. We integrate one patch for 2000 orbits and follow mass growth through more than three order of magnitude (the largest particle at the end of this simulation has a radius of 17.5 km). The escape speed of the largest particle grows considerably faster than the velocity dispersion of particles, suggesting impending runaway growth, although it is yet to begin in our simulations.

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