Related papers: Terrestrial Planet Formation at Home and Abroad
The large number of detected giant exoplanets offers the opportunity to improve our understanding of the formation mechanism, evolution, and interior structure of gas giant planets. The two main models for giant planet formation are core…
Morbidelli, Kleine & Nimmo (2024) (MKN) recently published a critical analysis on whether the terrestrial planets in the Solar System formed by rapid pebble accretion or by the classical route of multiple giant impacts between planetary…
Super-Earths with orbital periods less than 100 days are extremely abundant around Sun-like stars. It is unlikely that these planets formed at their current locations. Rather, they likely formed at large distances from the star and…
The final stage in the formation of terrestrial planets consists of the accumulation of ~1000-km ``planetary embryos'' and a swarm of billions of 1-10 km ``planetesimals.'' During this process, water-rich material is accreted by the…
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…
The large number of exoplanets found to orbit their host stars in very close orbits have significantly advanced our understanding of the planetary formation process. It is now widely accepted that such short-period planets cannot have…
The growing body of observational data on extrasolar planets and protoplanetary disks has stimulated intense research on planet formation and evolution in the past few years. The extremely diverse, sometimes unexpected physical and orbital…
The Earth appears non-chondritic in its abundances of refractory lithophile elements, posing a significant problem for our understanding of its formation and evolution. It has been suggested that this non-chondritic composition may be…
Gas giant planets play a fundamental role in shaping the orbital architecture of planetary systems and in affecting the delivery of volatile materials to terrestrial planets in the habitable zones. Current theories of gas giant planet…
Models of planet formation are built on underlying physical processes. In order to make sense of the origin of the planets we must first understand the origin of their building blocks. This review comes in two parts. The first part presents…
Planet formation encompasses processes that span a remarkable 40 magnitudes in mass, ranging from collisions between micron-sized grains inherited from the ISM to the accretion of gas by giant planets. The planet formation process takes…
The solar system's terrestrial planets are thought to have accreted over millions of years out of a sea of smaller embryos and planetesimals. Because it is impossible to know the surface density profile for solids and size frequency…
One of the most challenging problems we face in our understanding of planet formation is how Jupiter and Saturn could have formed before the the solar nebula dispersed. The most popular model of giant planet formation is the so-called 'core…
To date, two planetary systems have been discovered with close-in, terrestrial-mass planets (< 5-10 Earth masses). Many more such discoveries are anticipated in the coming years with radial velocity and transit searches. Here we investigate…
Circumstantial evidence suggests that most known extra-solar planetary systems are survivors of violent dynamical instabilities. Here we explore how giant planet instabilities affect the formation and survival of terrestrial planets. We…
With n-body simulations, we model terrestrial circumbinary planet (CBP) formation with an initial surface density profile motivated by hydrodynamic circumbinary gas disc simulations. The binary plays an important role in shaping the initial…
To date, no accretion model has succeeded in reproducing all observed constraints in the inner Solar System. These constraints include 1) the orbits, in particular the small eccentricities, and 2) the masses of the terrestrial planets --…
We model the early stages of planet formation in the Solar System, including continual planetesimal formation, and planetesimal and pebble accretion onto planetary embryos in an evolving disk driven by a disk wind. The aim is to constrain…
Pebbles of millimeter sizes are abundant in protoplanetary discs around young stars. Chondrules inside primitive meteorites - formed by melting of dust aggregate pebbles or in impacts between planetesimals - have similar sizes. The role of…
Terrestrial planet formation (TPF) is a difficult problem that has vexed researchers for decades. Numerical models are only partially successful at reproducing the orbital architecture of the inner planets, but have generally not considered…