“Skipped planet formation” can occur as a result of the compression of gas and dust between major planets. Like fillings in a cosmic sandwich, smaller planets can be born when gas and dust are squeezed between larger worlds.

The newly proposed process – called “sandwich planet formation” – will take place in massive planet-forming disks of gas and dust orbiting nascent stars, called “protoplanetary disks”. About 4.5 billion years ago, the Solar System itself would have existed as such a disk around the newborn sun from which planets emerged.

This new theory of planetary birth was developed by researchers at the University of Warwick. Consistent with the formation of compressed planets, the two large planets currently present in the protoplanetary disk are limiting the inward flow of dust through a flattened cloud of gas and dust. This leads to accumulation of interplanetary matter, with dense patches of protoplanetary disks collapsing into natal planets. This accumulation of gas and dust between the first two major planets will form an intermediate planet smaller than its two outer moons.

The team’s theory still needs to be confirmed, but if correct, it could explain how smaller planets like Mars are born. It could even explain the creation of planets like Uranus that were quite large in their own right but were still surrounded by larger worlds.

“Over the last decade, observations have shown that rings and gaps exist in protoplanetary disks. The gaps are where we would expect planets to be, and we know from theory that planets cause dust rings to form just outside them,” said Farzana Meru, Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Warwick. “What exactly is in these rings poses an important question to astronomers around the world.”

Meru explained that sandwich planet formation differs significantly from the currently popular models of planet formation, which see planets forming in a sequence starting from inside the protoplanetary disks before moving into their outer regions, and also suggested that planets must become even more massive. disk.

“Also, what’s really interesting is that we found in exoplanet observations that there are actually examples of this sandwich planetary architecture.
here, an average planet is less massive than its neighbors; it is also a reasonable part of systems.” — Meru. more

Scientists from the University of Warwick highlighted the fact that the field of planet formation has grown significantly over the past decade. This is in part thanks to high-resolution images of protoplanetary disks collected by advanced telescopes such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a system of 66 12-metre radio antennas forming a single radio in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. telescope.

The growth of planet formation as a field of science has allowed scientists to begin proposing new models of planet formation based on evidence they have seen both from images of the protoplanetary disk and from observations of fully formed exoplanets.

“These images gave us clues about how planets formed and evolved,” Meru said. “It’s exciting to be at the forefront of this research.” Source