Triggered planet formation in young stellar clusters
Final Report Abstract
We aimed to confirm the idea of tidally induced planet formation as a continuation of Thies et al. (2005) to solve the timescale problem of the formation of Uranus and Neptune. However, due to rising doubts on the feasibility of direct fragmentation in the planetary-mass regime (the density fluctuations heat up too much such that they disperse before collapsing under self gravity) the focus had been moved to the regime of brown dwarfs and the most massive planets which could indeed be modelled as forming in fragmenting perturbed circumstellar discs. A consistency check with observational data to the substellar and low-mass stellar mass function of several young star clusters has shown that the concluding assumption of a separate relevant population of ultralow-mass objects is in agreement with observational facts, and has made predictions about the actual shape of the fully-resolved mass function. The outcome of the study of triggered disc fragmentation is also in good consistency with this theoretical substellar IMF. This work, as well as the study of speedy planet formation through vortex-trapp ing of circumstellar dust is still ih progress (and a major study using AMR techniques is yet to be done).
Publications
- 2007, ApJ, 671, 767 — A discontinuity in the lowmass initial mass function
Thies, Ingo & Kroupa, Pavel
- 2008, MNRAS, 390, 1200 — A discontinuity in the low-mass IMF - the case of high multiplicity
Thies, Ingo & Kroupa, Pavel
- 2010, ApJ, 717, 577— Tidally induced brown dwarf and planet formation in circumstellar disks
Thies, Ingo, Kroupa, Pavel, Goodwin, Simon P., Stamatellos, Dimitrios & Whitworth, Anthony P.
