Formation and long-term evolution of 3D vortices in protoplanetary discs

In the context of planet formation, anticyclonic vortices have recently received lots of attention for the role they can play in planetesimals formation. Radial migration of intermediate size solids toward the central star may prevent their growth to larger solid grains. On the other hand, vortices can trap the dust and accelerate this growth, counteracting fast radial transport. Multiple effects have been shown to affect this scenario, such as vortex migration or decay. The aim of this paper is to study the formation of vortices by the Rossby wave instability and their long term evolution in a full three dimensional protoplanetary disc. We use a robust numerical scheme combined with adaptive mesh refinement in cylindrical coordinates, allowing to affordably compute long term 3D evolutions. We consider a full disc stratified both radially and vertically that is prone to formation of vortices by the Rossby wave instability. We show that the 3D Rossby vortices grow and survive over hundreds of years without migration. The localized overdensity which initiated the instability and vortex formation survives the growth of the Rossby wave instability for very long times. When the vortices are no longer sustained by the Rossby wave instability, their shape changes toward more elliptical vortices. This allows them to survive shear-driven destruction, but they may be prone to elliptical instability and slow decay. When the conditions for growing Rossby wave-related instabilities are maintained in the disc, large-scale vortices can survive over very long timescales and may be able to concentrate solids.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

Planet formation models: the interplay with the planetesimal disc

According to the sequential accretion model, giant planet formation is based first on the formation of a solid core which, when massive enough, can gravitationally bind gas from the nebula to form the envelope. In order to trigger the accretion of gas, the core has to grow up to several Earth masses before the gas component of the protoplanetary disc dissipates. We compute the formation of planets, considering the oligarchic regime for the growth of the solid core. Embryos growing in the disc stir their neighbour planetesimals, exciting their relative velocities, which makes accretion more difficult. We compute the excitation state of planetesimals, as a result of stirring by forming planets, and gas-solid interactions. We find that the formation of giant planets is favoured by the accretion of small planetesimals, as their random velocities are more easily damped by the gas drag of the nebula. Moreover, the capture radius of a protoplanet with a (tiny) envelope is also larger for small planetesimals. However, planets migrate as a result of disc-planet angular momentum exchange, with important consequences for their survival: due to the slow growth of a protoplanet in the oligarchic regime, rapid inward type I migration has important implications on intermediate mass planets that have not started yet their runaway accretion phase of gas. Most of these planets are lost in the central star. Surviving planets have either masses below 10 ME or above several Jupiter masses. To form giant planets before the dissipation of the disc, small planetesimals (~ 0.1 km) have to be the major contributors of the solid accretion process. However, the combination of oligarchic growth and fast inward migration leads to the absence of intermediate mass planets. Other processes must therefore be at work in order to explain the population of extrasolar planets presently known.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Theoretical models of planetary system formation: mass vs semi-major axis

Planet formation models have been developed during the last years in order to try to reproduce the observations of both the solar system, and the extrasolar planets. Some of these models have partially succeeded, focussing however on massive planets, and for the sake of simplicity excluding planets belonging to planetary systems. However, more and more planets are now found in planetary systems. This tendency, which is a result of both radial velocity, transit and direct imaging surveys, seems to be even more pronounced for low mass planets. These new observations require the improvement of planet formation models, including new physics, and considering the formation of systems. In a recent series of papers, we have presented some improvements in the physics of our models, focussing in particular on the internal structure of forming planets, and on the computation of the excitation state of planetesimals, and their resulting accretion rate. In this paper, we focus on the concurrent effect of the formation of more than one planet in the same protoplanetary disc, and show the effect, in terms of global architecture and composition of this multiplicity. We use a N-body calculation including collision detection to compute the orbital evolution of a planetary system. Moreover, we describe the effect of competition for accretion of gas and solids, as well as the effect of gravitational interactions between planets. We show that the masses and semi-major axis of planets are modified by both the effect of competition and gravitational interactions. We also present the effect of the assumed number of forming planets in the same system (a free parameter of the model), as well as the effect of the inclination and eccentricity damping.Comment: accepted in Astronomy and Astrophysic

A model for long-term climatic effects of impacts

We simulated climatic changes following the impacts of asteroids of different sizes on the present surface of Earth. These changes are assumed to be due to the variations of the radiation energy budget as determined by the amount of dust globally distributed in the atmosphere following the impact. A dust evolution model is used to determine the dust particle size spectra as a function of time and atmospheric altitude. We simulate radiation transfer through the dust layer using a multiple scattering calculation scheme and couple the radiative fluxes to an ocean circulation model in order to determine climatic changes and deviations over 2000 years following the impact. Resulting drops in sea surface temperatures are of the order of several degrees at the equator and decrease toward the poles, which is deduced from the increasing importance of infrared insulation of the dust cover at high latitudes. While gravitational settling reduces the atmospheric amount of dust significantly within 6 months, temperature changes remain present for roughly 1 year irrespective of impactor size. Below 1000 m ocean depth, these changes are small, and we do not observe significant modifications in the structure of the ocean circulation pattern. For bodies smaller than 3 km in diameter, climatic effects increase with impactor size. Beyond this threshold, there is enough dust in the atmosphere to block almost completely solar radiation; thus additional dust does not enhance climatic deviations anymore. In fact, owing to interaction in the infrared, we even observe smaller effects by going from a 5 km impactor to larger diameters

The HARPS search for southern extrasolar planets: XXXIII. New multi-planet systems in the HARPS volume limited sample: a super-Earth and a Neptune in the habitable zone

The vast diversity of planetary systems detected to date is defying our capability of understanding their formation and evolution. Well-defined volume-limited surveys are the best tool at our disposal to tackle the problem, via the acquisition of robust statistics of the orbital elements. We are using the HARPS spectrograph to conduct our survey of ~850 nearby solar-type stars, and in the course of the past nine years we have monitored the radial velocity of HD103774, HD109271, and BD-061339. In this work we present the detection of five planets orbiting these stars, with m*sin(i) between 0.6 and 7 Neptune masses, four of which are in two multiple systems, comprising one super-Earth and one planet within the habitable zone of a late-type dwarf. Although for strategic reasons we chose efficiency over precision in this survey, we have the capability to detect planets down to the Neptune and super-Earth mass range, as well as multiple systems, provided that enough data points are made available.Comment: 7 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication by A&A, 04-01-201

On the Early Evolution of Forming Jovian Planets II: Analysis of Accretion and Gravitational Torques

(abridged) We find that a disk can supply a forming planet with mass at an essentially infinite rate ($\sim1$\mj/25 yr) so that a gap could form very quickly. We show that mass accretion rates faster than $\sim10^{-4}$\mj/yr are not physically reasonable in the limit of either a thin, circumplanetary disk or of a spherical envelope. Planet growth and ultimately survival are therefore limited to the planet's ability to accept additional matter, not by the disk in which it resides. We find that common analytic torque approximations predict values that are a factor $\sim10$ larger than those obtained from the simulations. Accounting for the disk's vertical structure (crudely modeled through a gravitational softening parameter), small shifts in resonance positions due to pressure gradients, to disk self gravity and to inclusion of non-WKB terms in the analysis (Artymowicz 1993) reduce the difference to a factor $\sim3-6$. Torques from the corotation resonances that are positive in sign contribute 20-30% or more of the net torque on the planet. The assumption of linearity underlying theoretical analyses is recovered in the simulations with planets with masses below 0.5\mj, but the assumption that interactions occur only at the resonances is more difficult to support. The detailed shape of the disk's response varies from pattern to pattern, making its true position less clear. We speculate that the finite width allows for overlap and mixing between resonances and may be responsible for the remainder of the differences between torques from theory and simulation, but whether accounting for such overlap in a theory will improve the agreement with the simulations is not clear.Comment: 52 pages including 20 figures. also available at http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~andy/publications.htm