Planetesimal Accretion at Short Orbital Periods

TL;DR

This study uses N-body simulations to show that planetesimal accretion at very short orbital periods is highly efficient, producing large planetary embryos and a lack of residual small bodies in tightly-packed inner planetary systems.

Contribution

It demonstrates that planetesimal accretion at short orbital periods leads to near-complete embryo growth and differs from classical models by avoiding bimodal populations.

Findings

Accretion efficiency approaches 100% at short periods.

Embryo masses exceed classical isolation mass.

Inner systems are nearly devoid of small residual bodies.

Abstract

Formation models in which terrestrial bodies grow via the pairwise accretion of planetesimals have been reasonably successful at reproducing the general properties of the solar system, including small body populations. However, planetesimal accretion has not yet been fully explored in the context of the wide variety of recently discovered extrasolar planetary systems, particularly those that host short-period terrestrial planets. In this work, we use direct N-body simulations to explore and understand the growth of planetary embryos from planetesimals in disks extending down to ~1 day orbital periods. We show that planetesimal accretion becomes nearly 100 percent efficient at short orbital periods, leading to embryo masses that are much larger than the classical isolation mass. For rocky bodies, the physical size of the object begins to occupy a significant fraction of its Hill sphere towards the inner edge of the disk. In this regime, most close encounters result in collisions, rather than scattering, and the system does not develop a bimodal population of dynamically hot planetesimals and dynamically cold oligarchs, like is seen in previous studies. The highly efficient accretion seen at short orbital periods implies that systems of tightly-packed inner planets should be almost completely devoid of any residual small bodies. We demonstrate the robustness of our results to assumptions about the initial disk model, and also investigate the effects that our simplified collision model has on the emergence of this non-oligarchic growth mode in a planet forming disk.