On the oligarchic growth in a fully interacting system

TL;DR

This study uses GPU-based N-body simulations to examine how including planetesimal self-interactions affects the efficiency of planet formation, revealing that self-interactions enhance formation efficiency especially with fewer embryos.

Contribution

The paper introduces a GPU-accelerated N-body simulation method to analyze the impact of planetesimal self-interactions on planet formation efficiency, highlighting the importance of gravitational effects among planetesimals.

Findings

Self-interacting planetesimals increase formation efficiency.

Efficiency boost is due to eccentricity damping by self-gravity.

Similar results occur with more than 200 embryos.

Abstract

Protoplanets develop via collisions between planetesimals and planetary embryos in the final assembly stage of planet formation. The efficiency of the planet formation can be defined by the mass ratio between formed protoplanets and the initial mass of embryos and planetesimals. In final assembly planet formation models, the gravitational interactions between planetesimals are usually neglected due to computational difficulties, namely, computations require fewer resources in this way. We investigated the effect of this simplification via modeling the planet formation efficiency in a circumstellar belt of embryos and self-interacting or non-self-interacting planetesimals. We used our own developed GPU-based direct N-body integrator, HIPERION, for the simulations. We found that planet formation efficiency is higher if the planetesimal self-interaction is taken into account in models that contain the commonly used 100 embryos. The observed effect can be explained by the damping of planetesimal eccentricities by their self-gravity. The non-self-interacting and self-interacting models show qualitatively the same results if the initial number of embryos is above 200.