Final Masses of Giant Planets II: Jupiter Formation in a Gas-Depleted Disk

TL;DR

This paper models the final masses of giant planets like Jupiter in gas-depleted disks, showing how low-mass disks and gas depletion influence planet growth, migration, and solar system formation.

Contribution

It introduces a new model combining empirical gas capture rates and shallow disk gap effects, explaining giant planet formation in low-mass, gas-depleted disks.

Findings

Giant planets' growth is mainly controlled by global disk accretion rather than gap formation.

Low-mass gas disks can explain Jupiter's high metallicity and suppressed planetary migration.

Rapid gas capture leads to gas depletion and inner disk holes, affecting planet formation dynamics.

Abstract

Firstly, we study the final masses of giant planets growing in protoplanetary disks through capture of disk gas, by employing an empirical formula for the gas capture rate and a shallow disk gap model, which are both based on hydrodynamical simulations. The shallow disk gaps cannot terminate growth of giant planets. For planets less massive than 10 Jupiter masses, their growth rates are mainly controlled by the gas supply through the global disk accretion, rather than their gaps. The insufficient gas supply compared with the rapid gas capture causes a depletion of the gas surface density even at the outside of the gap, which can create an inner hole in the protoplanetary disk. Our model can also predict the depleted gas surface density in the inner hole for a given planet mass. Secondly, our findings are applied to the formation of our solar system. For the formation of Jupiter, a very low-mass gas disk with a few or several Jupiter masses is required at the beginning of its gas capture because of the non-stopping capture. Such a low-mass gas disk with sufficient solid material can be formed through viscous evolution from an initially $\sim$10AU-sized compact disk with the solar composition. By the viscous evolution with a moderate viscosity of $\alpha \sim 10^{-3}$, most of disk gas accretes onto the sun and a widely spread low-mass gas disk remains when the solid core of Jupiter starts gas capture at $t \sim 10^7$ yrs. The depletion of the disk gas is suitable for explaining the high metallicity in giant planets of our solar system. A very low-mass gas disk also provides a plausible path where type I and II planetary migrations are both suppressed significantly. In particular, we also show that the type II migration of Jupiter-size planets becomes inefficient because of the additional gas depletion due to the rapid gas capture by themselves.