Inhibition of giant-planet formation by rapid gas depletion around young stars

Details Inhibition of giant-planet formation by rapid gas depletion around young stars Inhibition of giant-planet formation by rapid gas depletion around young stars

Feb 1995

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1995natur.373..494z&link_type=abstract

Nature, Volume 373, Issue 6514, pp. 494-496 (1995).

Computer Science

214

Scientific paper

ALTHOUGH stars form from clouds of gas and dust, there are insig-nificant amounts of gas around ordinary (Sun-like) stars. This suggests that hydrogen and helium, the primary constituents of planets such as Jupiter and Saturn, are not easily retained in orbit as a star matures. The gas-giant planets in the Solar System must therefore have formed rapidly. Models of their formation generally suggest that a solid core formed in <=106 yr, followed by the accretion of the massive gaseous envelope in ~107 yr (refs 1-5). But how and when the gas of the solar nebula dissipated, and how this compares with the predicted timescale of gas-giant formation, remains unclear6,7, in part because direct observations of circumstellar gas have been made only for stars either younger or older than the critical range of 106-107 yr (refs 8-15). Here we report observations of the molecular gas surrounding 20 stars whose ages are likely to be in this range. The gas dissipates rapidly; after a few million years the mass remaining is typically much less than the mass of Jupiter. Thus, if gas-giant planets are common in the Galaxy, they must form even more quickly than present models suggest.

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