Related papers: Merging Criteria for Planetesimal Collisions
The final stage of terrestrial planet formation consists of the cleanup of residual planetesimals after the giant impact phase. Dynamically, a residual planetesimal population is needed to damp the high eccentricities of the terrestrial…
The debate over whether kilometer-sized solids, or planetesimals, assemble by collision-induced chemical sticking or by gravity-driven unstable modes remains unsettled. In light of recent work showing that gravitational growth can occur…
Most major planetary bodies in the solar system rotate in the same direction as their orbital motion: their spin is prograde. Theoretical studies to explain the direction as well as the magnitude of the spin vector have had mixed success.…
We present cross sections and reaction rates for merging to occur during encounters of equal-mass spherical galaxies. As an application, we determine the rate of galaxy merging in clusters of galaxies. We present results for two types of…
We explore the heating and differentiation of rocky planets that grow by rapid pebble accretion. Our terrestrial planets grow outside of the ice line and initially accrete 28\% water ice by mass. The accretion of water stops after the…
Some scenarios for planetesimal formation go through a phase of collapse of gravitationally bound clouds of mm-cm-sized pebbles. Such clouds can form for example through the streaming instability in protoplanetary disks. We model the…
Collisions are a fundamental process in planet formation. If colliding objects simply merge, a planetary object can grow. However, if the collision is disruptive, planetary growth is prevented. Therefore, the impact conditions under which…
The standard model of planet formation considers an initial phase in which planetesimals form from a dust disk, followed by a phase of mutual planetesimal-planetesimal collisions, leading eventually to the formation of planetary embryos.…
We simulate planet migration caused by interactions between planets and a planetesimal disk. We use an N-body integrator optimized for near-Keplerian motion that runs in parallel on a video graphics card, and that computes all pair-wise…
Graze-and-merge collisions (GMCs) are common multi-step mergers occurring in low-velocity off-axis impacts between similar sized planetary bodies. The first impact happens at somewhat faster than the mutual escape velocity; for typical…
The core-accretion and disk instability models have so far been used to explain planetary formation. These models have different conditions, such as planet mass, disk mass, and metallicity for formation of gas giants. The core-accretion…
Collisions of mm-size dust aggregates play a crucial role in the early phases of planet formation. We developed a laboratory setup to observe collisions of dust aggregates levitating at mbar pressures and elevated temperatures of 800 K. We…
Stellar perturbations affect planet-formation in binary systems. Recent studies show that the planet-formation stage of mutual accretion of km-sized planetesimals is most sensitive to binary effects. In this paper, the condition for…
Planetesimal formation is still mysterious. One of the ways to form planetesimals is to invoke a gas pressure bump in a protoplanetary disc. In our previous paper, we propose a new scenario in which the piled-up dust at a gas pressure bump…
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 formation of the Earth's core is a consequence of planetary accretion and processes in the Earth's interior. The mechanical process of planetary differentiation is likely to occur in large, if not global, magma oceans created by the…
We investigate the outcome of collisions in very different mass regimes, but an otherwise identical parameter setup, comprising the impact velocity ($v/v_\mathrm{esc}$), impact angle, mass ratio, and initial composition, w.r.t. simple…
We present numerical simulations of terrestrial planet formation that examine the growth continuously from planetesimals to planets in the inner Solar System. Previous studies show that the growth will be inside-out, but it is still common…
Numerous small bodies inevitably lead to cratering impacts on large planetary bodies during planet formation and evolution. As a consequence of these small impacts, a fraction of the target material escapes from the gravity of the large…
The growth and migration of planetesimals in a young protoplanetary disc are fundamental to planet formation. In all models of early growth, there are several processes that can inhibit grains from reaching larger sizes. Nevertheless,…