Toward a Deterministic Model of Planetary Formation IV: Effects of Type-I Migration

TL;DR

This paper extends a deterministic planet-formation model to include type-I migration effects, showing how migration influences embryo survival, planet formation, and the distribution of gas giants, with implications for observed exoplanet populations.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of type-I migration effects in planet formation, highlighting their impact on embryo survival and the formation of gas giants.

Findings

Embryos can survive inward migration during late disk stages.

Surviving embryos have several Earth masses, sufficient for rocky planet formation.

Gas giant formation probability depends on migration timescale.

Abstract

In a further development of a deterministic planet-formation model (Ida & Lin 2004), we consider the effect of type-I migration of protoplanetary embryos due to their tidal interaction with their nascent disks. During the early embedded phase of protostellar disks, although embryos rapidly emerge in regions interior to the ice line, uninhibited type-I migration leads to their efficient self-clearing. But, embryos continue to form from residual planetesimals at increasingly large radii, repeatedly migrate inward, and provide a main channel of heavy element accretion onto their host stars. During the advanced stages of disk evolution (a few Myr), the gas surface density declines to values comparable to or smaller than that of the minimum mass nebula model and type-I migration is no longer an effective disruption mechanism for mars-mass embryos. Over wide ranges of initial disk surface densities and type-I migration efficiency, the surviving population of embryos interior to the ice line has a total mass several times that of the Earth. With this reservoir, there is an adequate inventory of residual embryos to subsequently assemble into rocky planets similar to those around the Sun. But, the onset of efficient gas accretion requires the emergence and retention of cores, more massive than a few M_earth, prior to the severe depletion of the disk gas. The formation probability of gas giant planets and hence the predicted mass and semimajor axis distributions of extrasolar gas giants are sensitively determined by the strength of type-I migration. We suggest that the observed fraction of solar-type stars with gas giant planets can be reproduced only if the actual type-I migration time scale is an order of magnitude longer than that deduced from linear theories.