Giant Planet Formation

Abstract

Gas giant planets play a fundamental role in shaping the orbital architecture of planetary systems and in affecting the delivery of volatile materials to terrestrial planets in the habitable zones. Current theories of gas giant planet formation rely on either of two mechanisms: the core accretion model and the disk instability model. In this chapter, we describe the essential principles upon which these models are built and discuss the successes and limitations of each model in explaining observational data of giant planets orbiting the Sun and other stars.

In EXOPLANETS, edited by S. Seager, to be published in the Fall of 2010 in the Space Science Series of the University of Arizona Press (Tucson, AZ) (refereed; in press)

References in corpus (15)

• Optical Images of an Exosolar Planet 25 Light Years from Earth
• Models of Giant Planet formation with migration and disc evolution
• The Burst Mode of Protostellar Accretion
• Investigating fragmentation conditions in self-gravitating accretion discs
• Formation of giant planets by fragmentation of protoplanetary disks
• The effect of cooling on the global stability of self-gravitating protoplanetary discs
• Orbital Migration and Mass Accretion of Protoplanets in 3D Global Computations with Nested Grids
• The Thermal Regulation of Gravitational Instabilities in Protoplanetary Disks II. Extended Simulations with Varied Cooling Rates
• Convective cooling and fragmentation of gravitationally unstable disks
• Thermo-Hydrodynamics of Circumstellar Disks with High-mass Planets
• Testing Disk Instability Models for Giant Planet Formation
• Hydraulic/Shock-Jumps in Protoplanetary Disks
• Giant Planet Formation by Disk Instability: A Comparison Simulation With An Improved Radiative Scheme
• Flux-Limited Diffusion Approximation Models of Giant Planet Formation by Disk Instability
• Heavy Element Enrichment of a Jupiter-mass Protoplanet as a Function of Orbital Location

Cited by in corpus (14)

• MOA-2009-BLG-387Lb: A massive planet orbiting an M dwarf
• Emission Lines from the Gas Disk around TW Hydra and the Origin of the Inner Hole
• High-contrast Imaging Search for Planets and Brown Dwarfs around the Most Massive Stars in the Solar Neighborhood
• Formation, Orbital and Internal Evolutions of Young Planetary Systems
• Migration of planets embedded in a circumstellar disk
• The Heavy Element Composition of Disk Instability Planets Can Range From Sub- to Super-Nebular
• The contribution of the ARIEL space mission to the study of planetary formation
• Growth of Jupiter: Enhancement of Core Accretion by a Voluminous Low-Mass Envelope
• Migration of small moons in Saturn's rings
• Kernel phase imaging with VLT/NACO: high-contrast detection of new candidate low-mass stellar companions at the diffraction limit
• Which planets trigger longer-lived vortices: low-mass or high-mass?
• Constraints on planet formation via gravitational instability across cosmic time
• The late accretion and erosion of Vesta's crust recorded by eucrites and diogenites as an astrochemical window into the formation of Jupiter and the early evolution of the Solar System
• Geophysical Classification of Planets, Dwarf Planets, and Moons