Planetesimal Accretion at Short Orbital Periods

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, in particular 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% 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 toward 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, as 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 we also investigate the effects that our simplified collision model has on the emergence of this non-oligarchic growth mode in a planet-forming disk.

Keywords

• N-body problem
• Planet formation
• Exoplanet formation
• N-body simulations
• Astronomical simulations