Instabilities in the Early Solar System due to a Self-gravitating Disk

Abstract

Modern studies of the early solar system routinely invoke the possibility of an orbital instability among the giant planets triggered by gravitational interactions between the planets and a massive exterior disk of planetesimals. Previous works have suggested that this instability can be substantially delayed ($\sim$100s Myr) after the formation of the giant planets. Bodies in the disk are typically treated in a semi-active manner, wherein their gravitational force on the planets is included, but interactions between the planetesimals are ignored. We perform $N$-body numerical simulations using GENGA, which makes use of GPUs to allow for the inclusion of all gravitational interactions between bodies. Although our simulated Kuiper belt particles are more massive than the probable masses of real primordial Kuiper belt objects, our simulations indicate that the self-stirring of the primordial Kuiper belt is very important to the dynamics of the giant planet instability. We find that interactions between planetesimals dynamically heat the disk and typically prevent the outer solar system instability from being delayed by more than a few tens of million years after giant planet formation. Longer delays occur in a small fraction of systems that have at least 3.5 AU gaps between the planets and planetesimal disk. Our final planetary configurations match the solar system at a rate consistent with other previous works in most regards. Pre-instability heating of the disk typically yields final Jovian eccentricities comparable to the modern solar system value, which has been a difficult constraint to match in past works.

16 pages, 17 figures, 3 tables; accepted for publication in AJ

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Dynamical evidence for an early giant planet instability
• Early Solar System instability triggered by dispersal of the gaseous disk
• Solar System Physics for Exoplanet Research
• A record of the final phase of giant planet migration fossilized in the asteroid belt's orbital structure
• The early instability scenario: Mars' mass explained by Jupiter's orbit
• Dynamical origin of the Dwarf Planet Ceres
• The Dissipation of the Solar Nebula Constrained by Impacts and Core Cooling in Planetesimals
• Rethinking the role of the giant planet instability in terrestrial planet formation models
• Mercury's formation within the Early Instability Scenario
• Can narrow disks in the inner solar system explain the four terrestrial planets?
• Crash Chronicles: relative contribution from comets and carbonaceous asteroids to Earth's volatile budget in the context of an Early Instability
• Collisional Growth Within the Solar System's Primordial Planetesimal Disk and the Timing of the Giant Planet Instability