Breeding Super-Earths and Birthing Super-Puffs in Transitional Disks
Eve J. Lee, Eugene Chiang

TL;DR
This paper proposes a late formation scenario for super-Earths and super-puffs in transitional disks, explaining their atmospheric properties and orbital configurations through gas-poor, in situ formation and migration.
Contribution
It introduces a unified model where super-Earths form late in gas-poor environments and super-puffs acquire thick atmospheres outside 1 AU, addressing their observed characteristics.
Findings
Super-Earths can form with percent-by-weight atmospheres after 0.1-1 Myr.
Super-puffs acquire thick atmospheres outside ~1 AU and migrate inward.
Super-Earth formation is robust across a wide range of ambient gas densities.
Abstract
The riddle posed by super-Earths (1-4, 2-20) is that they are not Jupiters: their core masses are large enough to trigger runaway gas accretion, yet somehow super-Earths accreted atmospheres that weigh only a few percent of their total mass. We show that this puzzle is solved if super-Earths formed late, as the last vestiges of their parent gas disks were about to clear. This scenario would seem to present fine-tuning problems, but we show that there are none. Ambient gas densities can span many (up to 9) orders of magnitude, and super-Earths can still robustly emerge after 0.1-1 Myr with percent-by-weight atmospheres. Super-Earth cores are naturally bred in gas-poor environments where gas dynamical friction has weakened sufficiently to allow constituent protocores to merge. So little gas is present at the time of core assembly that cores hardly migrate by disk…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAstro and Planetary Science · Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies · Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
