Halting planet migration by photoevaporation from the central source

Abstract

The recent discovery of Jupiter-mass planets orbiting at a few AU from their stars compliments earlier detections of massive planets on very small orbits. The short period orbits strongly suggest that planet migration has occurred, with the likely mechanism being tidal interactions between the planets and the gas disks out of which they formed. The newly discovered long period planets, together with the gas giant planets in our solar system, show that migration is either absent or rapidly halted in at least some systems. We propose a mechanism for halting type-II migration at several AU in a gas disk. Photoevaporation of the disk by irradiation from the central star can produce a gap in the disk at a few AU, preventing planets outside the gap from migrating down to the star. This would result in an excess of systems with planets at or just outside the photoevaporation radius.

12 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication by ApJ Letters

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• Experimental Design for the Gemini Planet Imager
• Evolutionary Tracks of Trapped, Accreting Protoplanets: the Origin of the Observed Mass-Period Relation
• SCUBA Observations of Dust around Lindroos Stars: Evidence for a Substantial Submillimetre Disc Population
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• Do Giant Planets Survive Type II Migration?
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• Dispersal of protoplanetary disks by the combination of magnetically driven and photoevaporative winds
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• Numerical simulations of type I planetary migration in nonturbulent magnetized discs
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• Indications for grain growth and mass decrease in cold dust disks around Classical T Tauri stars in the MBM 12 young association
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