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Two teams of researchers who presented their models of the early solar system on October 4 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, Calif., began their work by trying to address a long-standing mystery. According to the standard model of planet formation, Mars ought to be five to 10 times as massive as it actually is.
The standard model assumes that the swirling disk of gas, dust and ice that circled the young sun and out of which the planets condensed had a continuous, relatively smooth distribution of material. David Minton and Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., challenged that assumption with a model in which the planet-forming disk had a gap in it at about the distance from the sun where Mars now resides...
Simulations by the team show that as grains of dust run into each other and coalesce in the disk, the region closest to the sun forms moon-sized planetary embryos faster than the outer regions do. The density of grains is higher in the inner regions and material there orbits the sun faster, so it is more likely to collide and stick to make bigger bodies.
The gravitational interactions among moon-sized embryos near Earth and Venus stirred up and gravitationally scattered grains, or planetesimals, in the disk. The grains in turn exerted forces back on the planetary embryos. The forces from stirred-up grains on either side of most embryos cancelled out, and those planetary embryos stayed put.
However, for the outermost embryo in the group, the forces did not cancel out. With more stirred-up grains on one side of the embryo, toward the sun, than on the side facing the outer solar system, this embryo was pushed out through the grains of the disk in just a few hundred thousand years, packing on mass as it journeyed. At about 1.5 times the Earth-sun distance, where Minton and Levison believe a gap had opened up in the planet-forming disk, the traveling embryo came to a halt and could no longer accumulate any more mass because the material simply wasn’t there.
Stranded, the embryo became as massive as Mars, but then stopped growing...
In a different model, Kevin Walsh of the Southwest Research Institute and his colleagues, including Alessandro Morbidelli of the Observatoire de la Côte D’Azur in Nice, France, explain Mars’ slimness by calling on the action of giant Jupiter. According to the researchers, Mars initially had plenty of material to pack on — until Jupiter forced its way into the inner solar system, dragged there as gas in the disk spiraled inward towards the sun. Jupiter then got thrown back into the outer solar system as its nearest large neighbor, Saturn, formed. Jupiter’s gravitational influence might also explain the origin of the gap in the disk proposed by Minton and Levison...
Two teams of researchers who presented their models of the early solar system on October 4 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, Calif., began their work by trying to address a long-standing mystery. According to the standard model of planet formation, Mars ought to be five to 10 times as massive as it actually is.
The standard model assumes that the swirling disk of gas, dust and ice that circled the young sun and out of which the planets condensed had a continuous, relatively smooth distribution of material. David Minton and Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., challenged that assumption with a model in which the planet-forming disk had a gap in it at about the distance from the sun where Mars now resides...
Simulations by the team show that as grains of dust run into each other and coalesce in the disk, the region closest to the sun forms moon-sized planetary embryos faster than the outer regions do. The density of grains is higher in the inner regions and material there orbits the sun faster, so it is more likely to collide and stick to make bigger bodies.
The gravitational interactions among moon-sized embryos near Earth and Venus stirred up and gravitationally scattered grains, or planetesimals, in the disk. The grains in turn exerted forces back on the planetary embryos. The forces from stirred-up grains on either side of most embryos cancelled out, and those planetary embryos stayed put.
However, for the outermost embryo in the group, the forces did not cancel out. With more stirred-up grains on one side of the embryo, toward the sun, than on the side facing the outer solar system, this embryo was pushed out through the grains of the disk in just a few hundred thousand years, packing on mass as it journeyed. At about 1.5 times the Earth-sun distance, where Minton and Levison believe a gap had opened up in the planet-forming disk, the traveling embryo came to a halt and could no longer accumulate any more mass because the material simply wasn’t there.
Stranded, the embryo became as massive as Mars, but then stopped growing...
In a different model, Kevin Walsh of the Southwest Research Institute and his colleagues, including Alessandro Morbidelli of the Observatoire de la Côte D’Azur in Nice, France, explain Mars’ slimness by calling on the action of giant Jupiter. According to the researchers, Mars initially had plenty of material to pack on — until Jupiter forced its way into the inner solar system, dragged there as gas in the disk spiraled inward towards the sun. Jupiter then got thrown back into the outer solar system as its nearest large neighbor, Saturn, formed. Jupiter’s gravitational influence might also explain the origin of the gap in the disk proposed by Minton and Levison...
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