The Imprint of the Protoplanetary Disk in the Accretion of Super-Earth Envelopes
25 Mar 2020
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Ali-Dib Mohamad
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Cumming Andrew
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Lin Douglas N. C.
Super-Earths are by far the most dominant type of exoplanet, yet their
formation is still not well understood. In particular, planet formation models
predict that many of them should have accreted enough gas to become gas giants...Here we examine the role of the protoplanetary disk in the cooling and
contraction of the protoplanetary envelope. In particular, we investigate the
effects of 1) the thermal state of the disk as set by the relative size of
heating by accretion or irradiation, and whether its energy is transported by
radiation or convection, and 2) advection of entropy into the outer envelope by
disk flows that penetrate the Hill sphere, as found in 3D global simulations. We find that, at 5 and 1 AU, this flow at the level reported in the
non-isothermal simulations where it penetrates only to ~ 0.3 times the Hill
radius has little effect on the cooling rate since most of the envelope mass is
concentrated close to the core, and far from the flow. On the other hand, at
0.1 AU, the envelope quickly becomes fully-radiative, nearly isothermal, and
thus cannot cool down, stalling gas accretion. This effect is significantly
more pronounced in convective disks, leading to envelope mass orders of
magnitude lower. Entropy advection at 0.1 AU in either radiative or convective
disks could therefore explain why super-Earths failed to undergo runaway
accretion. These results highlight the importance of the conditions and energy
transport in the protoplanetary disk for the accretion of planetary envelopes.(read more)