Making Terrestrial Planets: High Temperatures, FU Orionis Outbursts, Earth, and Planetary System Architectures

Abstract

Current protoplanetary dust coagulation theory does not predict dry silicate planetesimals, in tension with the Earth. While remedies to this predicament have been proposed, they have generally failed numerical studies, or are in tension with the Earth’s (low, volatility dependent) volatile and moderately volatile elemental abundances. Expanding on the work of Boley et al., we examine the implications of molten grain collisions and find that they may provide a solution to the dry silicate planetesimal problem. Furthermore, the source of the heating, whether it be a hot inner disk or an FU Orionis scale accretion event, would dictate the location of the resulting planetesimals, potentially controlling subsequent planetary system architectures. We hypothesize that systems that did undergo FU Orionis scale accretion events host planetary systems similar to our own, while ones that did not undergo such an accretion event instead host very close in, tightly packed planets such as those seen by Kepler .