On the migration of two planets in a disc and the formation of mean motion resonances

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a system of two super-Earths embedded in a protoplanetary disc. We build a simple model of an irradiated viscous disc and use analytical prescriptions for the planet-disc interactions which lead to migration. We show that depending on the disc parameters, planets' masses and their positions in the disc, the migration of each planet can be inwards or outwards and the migration of a two-planet system can be convergent (which may lead to formation of a first-order mean motion resonance, MMR) or divergent (a system moves away from MMR). We performed 3500 simulations of the migration of two-planet systems with various masses and initial orbits. Almost all of them end up as resonant configurations, although the period ratios may be very distant from the nominal values of a given MMR. We found that almost all the systems resulting from the migration are periodic configurations.