Survival of Planetary Systems

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Scientific paper

Recent low frequency results from attempts to detect Jupiter-sized planets around nearby stars have raised a question as to whether such objects are all that common. In the over 200 stars observed so far, the yield has been 3%. And, the close orbit (0.05 AU) of the nearly Jupiter-sized object around Peg 51 places the object in an environment where the current paradigm of planetary formation would not predict planets to form at all. Other newly discovered candidates, such a Vir 70 and HR3522, also have suspiciously small semi-major axes for gas giants. Of course, the low yield may be strongly influenced by selection effects since massive planets close to their primaries are more easily detected. Nevertheless, given the results to date, it is natural to wonder whether a planetary system like ours is such a natural outgrowth of a circumplantary disk. In particular, could there be forces absent from the existing paradigm that tend to destroy a planetary system once formed? We point out that strong gravitational interactions (i.e., disk tides) between a newly formed protoplanet and its precursor disk give rise to a net torque that drains angular momentum from the protoplanet's orbit. As a result, protoplanetary objects suffer orbital decay as the disk attempts to destroy the very system it spawns. Strong interaction (type I) leads to gap formation and co-evolution with the disk; weak inter- action (type II) leads to drift relative to the disk and in some cases, a much more rapid decay. Survival of a planetary system may be a comparatively uncommon outcome. Newly discovered planets such as Peg 51b may be evidence of such large-scale orbit migration due to disk tidal torques (i.e., Lin et al., 1996).

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