Minimum Mass Solar Nebulae and Planetary Migration

TL;DR

This paper examines the impact of a dense, long-lived protoplanetary disk on planetary migration, demonstrating that such conditions would prevent the survival of the Solar System's giant planets, thus constraining models of the Minimum Mass Solar Nebula.

Contribution

It provides a numerical analysis showing that a denser MMSN leads to rapid planetary migration, challenging previous assumptions and proposing a self-consistent way to construct viable MMSN models.

Findings

Jupiter undergoes runaway migration and falls into the Sun in dense disks.

Known migration prevention mechanisms fail in the Desch (2007) MMSN.

Planetary migration constrains the density profile of the MMSN.

Abstract

The Minimum Mass Solar Nebula (MMSN) is a protoplanetary disk that contains the minimum amount of solids necessary to build the planets of the Solar System. Assuming that the giant planets formed in the compact configuration they have at the beginning of the "Nice model", Desch (2007) built a new MMSN. He finds a decretion disk, about ten times denser than the well-known Hayashi MMSN. The disk profile is almost stationary for about ten million years. However, a planet in a protoplanetary disk migrates. In a massive, long-lived disk, this question has to be addressed. With numerical simulations, we show that the four giant planets of the Solar System could not survive in this disk. In particular, Jupiter enters the type III, runaway regime, and falls into the Sun like a stone. Known planet-planet interaction mechanisms to prevent migration, fail in this nebula, in contrast to the Hayashi MMSN. Planetary migration constrains the construction of a MMSN. We show how this should be done self-consistently.