Can Large-scale Migration Explain the Giant Planet Occurrence Rate?

Abstract

Abstract The giant planet occurrence rate rises with orbital period out to at least ∼300 days. Large-scale planetary migration through the disk has long been suspected to be the origin of this feature, as the timescale of standard Type I migration in a standard solar nebula is longer farther from the star. These calculations also find that typical Jupiter-bearing cores shuttle toward the disk inner edge on timescales orders of magnitude shorter than the gas disk lifetime. The presence of gas giants at myriad distances requires mechanisms to slow large-scale migration. We revisit the migration paradigm by building model occurrence rates to compare to the observations, computing simultaneously the migration of cores, their mass growth by gas accretion, and their gap opening. We show explicitly that the former two processes occur in tandem. Radial transport of planets can slow down significantly once deep gaps are carved out by their interaction with disk gas. Disks are more easily perturbed closer to the star, so accounting for gap opening flattens the final orbital period distribution. To recover the observed rise in occurrence rate, gas giants need to be more massive farther out, which is naturally achieved if their envelopes are dust-free. We find that only a narrow region of parameter space can recover the observed giant planet occurrence rate in orbital period, but not simultaneously the mass distribution of low-eccentricity giant planets. This challenges disk migration as the dominant origin channel of hot and warm Jupiters. Future efforts in characterizing the unbiased mass distribution will place stronger constraints on predictions from migration theory.