Related papers: The Formation of Ice Giants in a Packed Oligarchy:…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing and orbital eccentricities of giant planets, can be explained if the early Solar System evolved through a dynamical instability followed by migration of planets in…
We present 230 realizations of a numerical model of planet formation in systems without gas giants. These represent a scenario in which protoplanets grow in a region of a circumstellar disk where water ice condenses (the "ice line''), but…
Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…
We present a systematic examination of the changes in semi-major axis caused by the mutual interactions of a group of massive bodies orbiting a central star in the presence of eccentricity dissipation. For parameters relevant to the…
Chiang et al. 2006, hereafter C06 have recently proposed that the observed structure of the Kuiper belt could be the result of a dynamical instability of a system of ~5 primordial ice giant planets in the outer Solar System. According to…
Forming giant planets by disk instability requires a gaseous disk that is massive enough to become gravitationally unstable and able to cool fast enough for self-gravitating clumps to form and survive. Models with simplified disk cooling…
Runaway growth ends when the largest protoplanets dominate the dynamics of the planetesimal disk; the subsequent self-limiting accretion mode is referred to as ``oligarchic growth.'' Here, we begin by expanding on the existing analytic…
We study the orbital evolution of the 4 giant planets of our solar system in a gas disk. Our investigation extends the previous works by Masset and Snellgrove (2001) and Morbidelli and Crida (2007, MC07), which focussed on the dynamics of…
We investigate the formation of icy super-Earth mass planets within a gravitationally unstable ring of solids orbiting at 250-750 AU around a 1 solar mass star. Coagulation calculations demonstrate that a system of a few large oligarchs and…
Modeling the formation of cold giant planets around M dwarfs is difficult because their disks may not contain enough solids to form massive cores and because forming giants are expected to migrate inward through disk interactions. It is…
Observational evidence exists for the formation of gas giant planets on wide orbits around young stars by disk gravitational instability, but the roles of disk instability and core accretion for forming gas giants on shorter period orbits…
We use a hybrid, multiannulus, n-body-coagulation code to investigate the growth of km-sized planetesimals at 0.4-2 AU around a solar-type star. After a short runaway growth phase, protoplanets with masses of roughly 10^26 g and larger form…
The core accretion theory of planet formation has at least two fundamental problems explaining the origins of Uranus and Neptune: (1) dynamical times in the trans-Saturnian solar nebula are so long that core growth can take > 15 Myr, and…
In the Solar System giant planets come in two flavours: 'gas giants' (Jupiter and Saturn) with massive gas envelopes and 'ice giants' (Uranus and Neptune) with much thinner envelopes around their cores. It is poorly understood how these two…
Uranus and Neptune, the so-called "ice giants", represent a fascinating class of planets. They are the outermost planets in the solar system with intermediate masses/sizes, complex non-polar magnetic fields, strong atmospheric winds, and…
The dynamical structure of the Solar System can be explained by a period of orbital instability experienced by the giant planets. While a late instability was originally proposed to explain the Late Heavy Bombardment, recent work favors an…
Doppler surveys have shown that more massive stars have significantly higher frequencies of giant planets inside $\sim$ 3 AU than lower mass stars, consistent with giant planet formation by core accretion. Direct imaging searches have begun…
In the Nice model of solar system formation, Uranus and Neptune undergo an orbital upheaval, sweeping through a planetesimal disk. The region of the disk from which material is accreted by the ice giants during this phase of their evolution…
Over the last decade, evidence has mounted that the solar system's observed state can be favorably reproduced in the context of an instability-driven dynamical evolution model, such as the "Nice" model. To date, all successful realizations…
Observational evidence suggests that gas disk instability may be responsible for the formation of at least some gas giant exoplanets, particularly massive or distant gas giants. With regard to close-in gas giants, Boss (2017) used the…