Why do protoplanetary disks appear not massive enough to form the known exoplanet population?

TL;DR

This study compares exoplanet system masses with protoplanetary disk masses, revealing a surprising similarity or higher mass in exoplanet systems, challenging current understanding of planet formation and disk mass estimates.

Contribution

It provides a new comparison between exoplanet system masses and disk masses using Gaia data, highlighting a mass discrepancy and proposing hypotheses for rapid planet core formation or disk replenishment.

Findings

Exoplanet system masses are comparable or higher than disk masses.

Single and multiple exoplanet systems form distinct populations.

Disk dust masses may be underestimated, posing a conundrum.

Abstract

When and how planets form in protoplanetary disks is still a topic of discussion. Exoplanet detection surveys and protoplanetary disk surveys are now providing results that allow us to have new insights. We collect the masses of confirmed exoplanets and compare their dependence with stellar mass with the same dependence for protoplanetary disk masses measured in ~1-3 Myr old star-forming regions. The latter are recalculated by us using the new estimates of their distances derived from Gaia DR2 parallaxes. We note that single and multiple exoplanetary systems form two different populations, probably pointing to a different formation mechanism for massive giant planets around very low mass stars. While expecting that the mass in exoplanetary systems is much lower than the measured disk masses, we instead find that exoplanetary systems masses are comparable or higher than the most massive disks. This same result is found also by converting the measured planet masses into heavy-element content (core masses for the giant planets and full masses for the super-Earth systems) and by comparing this value with the disk dust masses. Unless disk dust masses are heavily underestimated, this is a big conundrum. An extremely efficient recycling of dust particles in the disk cannot solve this conundrum. This implies that either the cores of planets have formed very rapidly (<0.1-1 Myr) and large amount of gas is expelled on the same timescales from the disk, or that disks are continuously replenished of fresh planet-forming material from the environment. These hypotheses can be tested by measuring disk masses in even younger targets and by better understanding if and how the disks are replenished by their surroundings.