Terrestrial Planets Formation around Circumbinary Habitable Zone: Inward Migration in the Planetesimal Swarm
Abstract
According to the core accretion theory, circumbinary embryos can form only beyond a critical semimajor axis (CSMA). However, due to the relatively high density of solid materials in the inner disk, significant amount of small planetesimals must exist in the inner zone when embryos were forming outside this CSMA. So embryos migration induced by the planetesimal swarm is possible after the gas disk depletion. Through numerical simulations, we found (i) the scattering-driven inward migration of embryos is robust, planets can form in the habitable zone if we adopt a mass distribution of MMSN-like disk; (ii) the total mass of the planetesimals in the inner region and continuous embryo-embryo scattering are two key factors that cause significant embryo migrations; (iii) the scattering-driven migration of embryos is a natural water-deliver mechanism. We propose that planet detections should focus on the close binary with its habitable zone near CSMA.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1211.6803,
title = {Terrestrial Planets Formation around Circumbinary Habitable Zone: Inward Migration in the Planetesimal Swarm},
author = {Yan-Xiang Gong and Ji-Lin Zhou and Ji-Wei Xie},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1211.6803},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication at ApJL