Formation of planetary systems by pebble accretion and migration: How the radial pebble flux determines a terrestrial-planet or super-Earth growth mode

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the amount of pebble flux in protoplanetary discs determines whether planetary embryos evolve into terrestrial planets or super-Earths, highlighting two distinct formation pathways influenced by disc conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a model showing how a factor of two difference in pebble flux leads to different planetary growth modes, supported by numerical simulations combining pebble accretion and N-body dynamics.

Findings

Low pebble flux results in widely spaced terrestrial planets.

High pebble flux leads to closely packed super-Earth systems.

Pebble flux controls the transition between terrestrial and super-Earth formation modes.

Abstract

Super-Earths are found in tighter orbits than the Earth's around more than one third of main sequence stars. It has been proposed that super-Earths are scaled-up terrestrial planets that formed similarly, through mutual accretion of planetary embryos, but in discs much denser than the solar protoplanetary disc. We argue instead that terrestrial planets and super-Earths have two distinct formation pathways that are regulated by the disc's pebble reservoir. Through numerical integrations, which combine pebble accretion and N-body gravity between embryos, we show that a difference of a factor of two in the pebble mass-flux is enough to change the evolution from the terrestrial to the super-Earth growth mode. If the pebble mass-flux is small, then the initial embryos within the ice line grow slowly and do not migrate substantially, resulting in a widely spaced population of Mars-mass embryos when the gas disc dissipates. Without gas being present, the embryos become unstable and a small number of terrestrial planets are formed by mutual collisions. The final terrestrial planets are at most 5 Earth masses. Instead, if the pebble mass-flux is high, then the initial embryos within the ice line rapidly become sufficiently massive to migrate through the gas disc. Embryos concentrate at the inner edge of the disc and growth accelerates through mutual merging. This leads to the formation of a system of closely spaced super-Earths in the 5 to 20 Earth-mass range, bounded by the pebble isolation mass. Generally, instabilities of these super-Earth systems after the disappearance of the gas disc trigger additional merging events and dislodge the system from resonant chains. The pebble flux - which controls the transition between the two growth modes - may be regulated by the initial reservoir of solids in the disc or the presence of more distant giant planets that can halt the radial flow of pebbles.