Jupiter's Decisive Role in the Inner Solar System's Early Evolution

Abstract

The statistics of extrasolar planetary systems indicate that the default mode of planet formation generates planets with orbital periods shorter than 100 days, and masses substantially exceeding that of the Earth. When viewed in this context, the Solar System is unusual. Here, we present simulations which show that a popular formation scenario for Jupiter and Saturn, in which Jupiter migrates inward from a > 5 AU to a ~ 1.5 AU before reversing direction, can explain the low overall mass of the Solar System's terrestrial planets, as well as the absence of planets with a < 0.4 AU. Jupiter's inward migration entrained s ~ 10-100 km planetesimals into low-order mean-motion resonances, shepherding and exciting their orbits. The resulting collisional cascade generated a planetesimal disk that, evolving under gas drag, would have driven any pre-existing short-period planets into the Sun. In this scenario, the Solar System's terrestrial planets formed from gas-starved mass-depleted debris that remained after the primary period of dynamical evolution.

Main text: 5 pages, 3 figures; Supplementary Information: 5 pages, 3 figures; accepted to PNAS

References in corpus (7)

• Building Terrestrial Planets
• Migration and the formation of systems of hot super-Earths and Neptunes
• Dynamics of the giant planets of the solar system in the gaseous proto-planetary disk and relationship to the current orbital architecture
• Water Delivery and Giant Impacts in the 'Grand Tack' Scenario
• Full Numerical Simulations of Catastrophic Small Body Collisions
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• Spitzer Detection of the Transiting Jupiter-analog Exoplanet Kepler-167e
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• Dynamical Packing in the Habitable Zone: The Case of Beta CVn
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• Resilient habitability of nearby exoplanet systems