Modes of Gaseous Planet Formation

Abstract

The discovery of gas giant planets around nearby stars has launched a new era in our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems. However, none of the over four dozen companions detected to date strongly resembles Jupiter or Saturn: their inferred masses range from sub-Saturn-mass to 10 Jupiter-masses or more, while their orbits extend from periods of a few days to a few years. Given this situation, it seems prudent to re-examine mechanisms for gas giant planet formation. The two extreme cases are top-down or bottom-up. The latter is the core accretion mechanism, long favored for our Solar System, where a roughly 10 Earth-mass solid core forms by collisional accumulation of planetesimals, followed by hydrodynamic accretion of a gaseous envelope. The former is the long-discarded disk instability mechanism, where the protoplanetary disk forms self-gravitating, gaseous protoplanets through a gravitational instability of the gas, accompanied by settling and coagulation of dust grains to form solid cores. Both of these mechanisms have a number of advantages and disadvantages, making a purely theoretical choice between them difficult at present. Observations should be able to decide the dominant mechanism by dating the epoch of gas giant planet formation: core accretion requires more than a million years to form a Jupiter-mass planet, whereas disk instability is much more rapid.