DISK-FED GIANT PLANET FORMATION

Abstract

Massive giant planets, such as the ones being discovered by direct imaging surveys, likely experience the majority of their growth through a circumplanetary disk. We argue that the entropy of accreted material is determined by boundary layer processes, unlike the “cold-” or “hot-start” hypotheses usually invoked in the core-accretion and direct-collapse scenarios. A simple planetary evolution model illustrates how a wide range of radius and luminosity tracks become possible, depending on details of the accretion process. Specifically, the protoplanet evolves toward “hot-start” tracks if the scale height of the boundary layer is ≳0.24, a value not much larger than the scale height of the circumplanetary disk. Understanding the luminosity and radii of young giant planets will thus require detailed models of circumplanetary accretion.