Related papers: Merging Criteria for Giant Impacts of Protoplanets
In the standard scenario of planet formation, terrestrial planets, ice giants, and cores of gas giants are formed by the accumulation of planetesimals. However, there are few N-body simulation studies of planetesimal accretion that…
The final stage of terrestrial planet formation is known as the giant impact stage where protoplanets collide with one another to form planets. So far this stage has been mainly investigated by N-body simulations with an assumption of…
Numerical simulations of the stochastic end stage of planet formation typically begin with a population of embryos and planetesimals that grow into planets by merging. We analyzed the impact parameters of collisions leading to the growth of…
Pairwise collisions between terrestrial embryos are the dominant means of accretion during the last stage of planet formation. Hence, their realistic treatment in N-body studies is critical to accurately model the formation of terrestrial…
During the formation of rocky planets, the surface environments of growing protoplanets were dramatically different from those of present-day planets. The release of gravitational energy during accretion would have maintained a molten…
The final stage of planet formation is dominated by collisions between planetary embryos. The dynamics of this stage determine the orbital configuration and the mass and composition of planets in the system. In the solar system, late giant…
The late stages of terrestrial planet formation are dominated by giant impacts that collectively influence the growth, composition and habitability of any planets that form. Hitherto, numerical models designed to explore these late stage…
During the late stage of terrestrial planet formation, hit-and-run collisions are about as common as accretionary mergers, for expected velocities and angles of giant impacts. Average hit-and-runs leave two major remnants plus debris: the…
Planetary systems with sufficiently small orbital spacings can experience planetary mergers and ejections. The branching ratio of mergers vs ejections depends sensitively on the treatment of planetary close encounters. Previous works have…
The last phase of the formation of rocky planets is dominated by collisions among Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos. Simulations of this phase need to handle the difficulty of including the post-impact material without saturating the…
In our solar system, Mars-sized protoplanets frequently collided with each other during the last stage of terrestrial planet formation called the giant impact stage. Giant impacts eject a large amount of material from the colliding…
Constraining planet formation models based on the observed exoplanet population requires generating large samples of synthetic planetary systems, which can be computationally prohibitive. A significant bottleneck is simulating the giant…
Giant impacts, the collisions between planetary embryos, play a crucial role in sculpting the planets and their orbital architectures. Numerical simulations have advanced our understanding of these events, enabling estimations of mass and…
Planetesimal accretion during planet formation is usually treated as collisionless. Such accretion from a uniform and dynamically cold disk predicts protoplanets with slow retrograde rotation. However, if the building blocks of…
The formation of giant planets requires accumulation of ~10 Earth mass in solids; but how do protoplanets acquire their mass? There are many, often competing processes that regulate the accretion rate of protoplanets. To assess their…
In the standard formation models of terrestrial planets in the solar system and close-in super-Earths in non-resonant orbits recently discovered by exoplanet observations, planets are formed by giant impacts of protoplanets or planetary…
Planets grow via the collisional accretion of small bodies in a protoplanetary disk. Such small bodies feel strong gas drag and their orbits are significantly affected by the gas flow and atmospheric structure around the planet. We…
During the last stages of the terrestrial planet formation, planets grow mainly through giant-impacts with large planetary embryos. The Earth's Moon was suggested to form through one of these impacts. However, since the proto-Earth has…
The terrestrial planets are believed to have formed by violent collisions of tens of lunar- to Mars-size protoplanets at time t<200 Myr after the protoplanetary gas disk dispersal (t_0). The solar system giant planets rapidly formed during…
During the final stage of planetary formation, different formation pathways of planetary embryos could significantly influence the observed variations in planetary densities. Of the approximately 5,000 exoplanets identified to date, a…