Related papers: Forming Mercury from excited initial conditions
The formation history of Jupiter has been of interest due to its ability to shape the solar system's history. Yet little attention has been paid to the formation and growth of Saturn and the other giant planets. Here, we explore the…
Reproducing Uranus and Neptune remains a challenge for simulations of solar system formation. The ice giants' peculiar obliquities suggest that they both suffered giant collisions during their formation. Thus, there must have been an epoch…
Kepler has identified over 600 multiplanet systems, many of which have several planets with orbital distances smaller than that of Mercury -- quite different from the Solar System. Because these systems may be difficult to explain in the…
We present the results of hydrodynamic simulations of the formation and subsequent orbital evolution of giant planets embedded in a circumbinary disc. We assume that a 20 earth masses core has migrated to the edge of the inner cavity formed…
The MESSENGER mission sought to discover what physical processes determined Mercury's high metal to silicate ratio. Instead, the mission has discovered multiple anomalous characteristics about our innermost planet. The lack of FeO and the…
The existence of planets born in environments highly perturbed by a stellar companion represents a major challenge to the paradigm of planet formation. In numerical simulations, the presence of a close binary companion stirs up the relative…
Advances in computing power and numerical methodologies over the past several decades sparked a prolific output of dynamical investigations of the late stages of terrestrial planet formation. Among other peculiar inner solar system…
The solar system planetary architecture has been proposed to be consistent with the terrestrial and giant planets forming from material rings at ~1 au and ~5 au, respectively. Here, we show that super-Earths and mini-Neptunes may share a…
The accretion of pebbles on planetary cores has been widely studied in recent years and is found to be a highly effective mechanism for planetary growth. While most studies assume planetary cores as an initial condition in their simulation,…
Recent high precision meteoritic data infers that Mars finished its accretion rapidly within 10 Myr of the beginning of the Solar system and had an accretion zone that did not entirely overlap with the Earth's. Here we present a detailed…
Recent work has shown that aside from the classical view of collisions by increasingly massive planetesimals, the accretion of mm- to m-sized 'pebbles' can also reproduce the mass-orbit distribution of the terrestrial planets. Here, we…
It is likely that multiple bodies with masses between those of Mars and Earth ("planetary embryos") formed in the outer planetesimal disk of the solar system. Some of these were likely scattered by the giant planets into orbits with…
We present collapse simulations of strongly magnetised, turbulent molecular cloud cores with masses ranging from 2.6 to 1000 M_sun in order to study the influence of the initial conditions on the turbulence-induced disc formation mechanism…
The giant impact hypothesis is the dominant theory of how the Earth-Moon system was formed. Models have been created that can produce a disk of debris with the proper mass and composition to create our Moon. Models have also been created…
Most of the properties of the Earth-Moon system can be explained by a collision between a planetary embryo and the growing Earth late in the accretion process. Simulations show that most of the material that eventually aggregates to form…
Exomoons orbiting terrestrial or super-terrestrial exoplanets have not yet been discovered; their possible existence and properties are therefore still an unresolved question. Here we explore the collisional formation of exomoons through…
Forming planetary systems are populated by large numbers of gravitationally interacting planetary bodies, spanning from massive giant planets to small planetesimals akin to present-day asteroids and comets. All these planetary bodies are…
In models of planetary accretion, pebbles form by dust coagulation and rapidly migrate toward the central star. Planetesimals may continuously form from pebbles over the age of the protoplanetary disk by yet uncertain mechanisms. Meanwhile,…
The planet Mercury possesses a small but highly dynamic magnetosphere in which the role and dynamics of electrons are still largely unknown. We aim at modeling the global dynamics of solar wind electrons impinging on Mercury's…
Formation of planets in the 47 UMa system is followed in an evolving protoplanetary disk composed of gas and solids. The evolution of the disk is calculated from an early stage, when all solids, assumed to be high-temperature silicates, are…