2024/12/01 by Max Nguyen, V. Adibekyan, Vardan Adibekyan · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astro and Planetary Science #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s10509-024-04388-2
Abstract The Core Accretion model is widely accepted as the primary mechanism for forming planets up to a few Jupiter masses. However, the formation of super-massive planets remains a subject of debate, as their formation via the Core Accretion model requires super-solar metallicities. Assuming stellar atmospheric abundances reflect the composition of protoplanetary disks, and that disk mass scales linearly with stellar mass, we calculated the total amount of metals in planet-building materials that could contribute to the formation of massive planets. In this work, we studied a sample of 172 Jupiter-mass planets and 93 planets with masses exceeding 4 M\jupiter <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>M</mml:mi> <mml:mi>♃</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> . Our results consistently demonstrate that planets with masses above 4 M\jupiter <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>M</mml:mi> <mml:mi>♃</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> form in disks with at least as much metal content as those hosting planets with masses between 1 and 4 M\jupiter <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>M</mml:mi> <mml:mi>♃</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> , often with slightly higher metallicity, typically exceeding that of the proto-solar disk. We interpret this as strong evidence that the formation of very massive Jupiters is feasible through Core Accretion and encourage planet formation modelers to test our observational conclusions.