Jupiter's Decisive Role in the Inner Solar System's Early Evolution
arXiv:1503.06945 · doi:10.1073/pnas.1423252112
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
- Overcoming the Meter Barrier and The Formation of Systems with Tightly-packed Inner Planets (STIPs)
- Signatures of massive collisions in debris discs
Cited by in corpus (6)
- Challenges in Planet Formation
- Effects of variable eccentricity on the climate of an Earth-like world
- Long-Period Giant Companions to Three Compact, Multiplanet Systems
- The Magellan PFS Planet Search Program: Radial Velocity and Stellar Abundance Analyses of the 360 AU, Metal-Poor Binary "Twins" HD 133131A & B
- Dynamical Constraints on Mercury's Collisional Origin
- Spitzer Detection of the Transiting Jupiter-analog Exoplanet Kepler-167e