Clumps in the outer disk by disk instability: Why they are initially gas giants and the legacy of disruption

By Aaron C. Boley, T. Hayfield, Lucio Mayer, R. Durisen. 2009

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We explore the initial conditions for fragments in the extended regions ( r ≳ 50 AU ) of gravitationally unstable disks. We combine analytic estimates for the fragmentation of spiral arms with 3D SPH simulations to show that initial fragment masses are in the gas giant regime. These initial fragments will have substantial angular momentum, and should form disks with radii of a few AU. We show that clumps will survive for multiple orbits before they undergo a second, rapid collapse due to H 2 dissociation and that it is possible to destroy bound clumps by transporting them into the inner disk. The consequences of disrupted clumps for planet formation, dust processing, and disk evolution are discussed. We argue that it is possible to produce Earth-mass cores in the outer disk during the earliest phases of disk evolution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4020a9ffda3e8bbdf45887e06fe68f355349c957

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Citations in the corpus

DIRECT IMAGING OF A COLD JOVIAN EXOPLANET IN ORBIT AROUND THE SUN-LIKE STAR GJ 504 (2013, background): “Also, the significant gas accretion onto a clump formed according to the GI process may prevent the planet from remaining less massive (Zhu et al. 2012; Boley et al. 2010), disallowing the occurrence of a low-mass planet like GJ 504 b. 5.3.3.”
Dynamics of Protoplanetary Disks (2010, background): “Accretion in this regime is highly variable, due to a combination of the dominance of global modes (Forgan et al. 2010, Laughlin & Bodenheimer 1994), the effect of infall, and the formation and disruption of clumps (Boley et al. 2010, Vorobyov & Basu 2010).”
VARIABLE PROTOSTELLAR ACCRETION WITH EPISODIC BURSTS (2015, background): “…arms and other fragments (Vorobyov & Basu 2006, 2010a; Machida et al. 2011; Tsukamoto et al. 2014), dispersal of fragments due to tidal torques (Boley et al. 2010; Zhu et al. 2012), and ejection of fragments from the disk into the intracluster medium due to multi-fragment gravitational…”
CHALLENGES IN FORMING PLANETS BY GRAVITATIONAL INSTABILITY: DISK IRRADIATION AND CLUMP MIGRATION, ACCRETION, AND TIDAL DESTRUCTION (2011, background): “It may be, however, that the tidal destruction of the clumps produced by GI-induced fragmentation (Boley et al. 2010) or the episodic nature of the GI accretion (Boley & Durisen 2008) can serve as a mechanism to transport mass to AU scales (compared with the steady accretion by GI as suggested by…”
TOWARD CHEMICAL CONSTRAINTS ON HOT JUPITER MIGRATION (2014, background): “The initial masses of such planets is in the gas giant regime (Boley et al. 2010), so significant subsequent growth (or disruption) cannot occur for these planets to be detected as∼1MJup hot Jupiters (and not brown dwarfs).”
Rapid inward migration of planets formed by gravitational instability (2011, methodology): “This estimate of the clump’s initial mass, which is based on the fragmentation of spiral arms, is typically a factor 5 − 10 smaller than the Toomre mass (see Boley et al. 2010, their figure 1, and references therein).”
Planet-Disk Interaction and Orbital Evolution (2012, background): “Boley et al. (2010) discuss one such simulation in which a clump is scattered onto a highly eccentric orbit, leading to tidal destruction at periastron.”
Gravitational Instabilities in Circumstellar Disks (2016, background): “Nevertheless, the agreement between the simple analytic formulae below and radiative transfer calculations is quite good, making these useful for estimation purposes (Zhu et al. 2012; Boley et al. 2010).”