Orbital Migration and Mass Accretion of Protoplanets
in 3D Global Computations with Nested Grids
Gennaro D'Angelo, Wilhelm Kley & Thomas Henning
Astrophysical Journal, 586, 540
Abstract:
We investigate the evolution of protoplanets with different masses
embedded in an accretion disk, via global
fully three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations.
We consider a range of planetary masses ranging from 3 Earth masses
upto one Jupiter mass, and take physically realistic gravitational
potentials of the planets into account.
To calculate accurately the gravitational torques exerted by disk material
and to investigate the accretion process onto the planet,
the flow dynamics has to be resolved on large as well as short
length scales.
We achieve this strict resolution requirement
by applying a nested-grid refinement technique which allows to
greatly enhance the local resolution.
Our results from alltogether 48 simulations show that for larger
planetary masses above approximately
0.1 Jupiter masses the migration rates of the planets are relatively
constant and agree well for two- and three-dimensional calculations.
Below that mass, we find on average that the smaller the mass
of the planets the longer the migration rates.
For the mass growth larger differences between two- and
three-dimensional calculations are found in particular
for planets with smaller masses below about ten earth masses.
We derive analytical approximations for the numerically computed
migration and mass groth rates.
ApJ-Paper, March 2003
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