Astrometric signatures of giant-planet formation

Alan P. Boss ()
Additional contact information
Alan P. Boss: Carnegie Institution of Washington

Nature, 1998, vol. 393, issue 6681, 141-143

Abstract: Abstract The discovery1,2,3,4,5,6 of giant planets orbiting nearby solar-type stars raises anew the question of how they formed. Two very different mechanisms have been proposed. Gravitational instability7,8 is the process by which planets form directly from the gas in the accrection disk around the young star. The other alternative is core accretion9,10, where rocky cores of about 10 Earth masses form, followed by the hydrodynamical accretion of gas. Here I show that these processes have very different astrometric signatures, and that it is observationally possible to distinguish between them. Planets that form through gravitational instabilities do so rapidly, so that within just a few hundred years of the onset of the instability the nascent planet is making the young stellar object wobble in its orbit. This can be seen in the youngest stellar objects, with ages as little as 0.1 Myr. If planets form by core accretion, an observable wobble will not be visible for 10–20 Myr. Observations of a suitable ensemble of optically visible young stellar objects (such as those in the Taurus molecular cloud) over a period of several decades should be able to determine which of the two processes is responsible for giant-planet formation.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/30177 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:393:y:1998:i:6681:d:10.1038_30177

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/30177

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().