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Setting the Stage: Planet Formation and Volatile Delivery

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Abstract

The diversity in mass and composition of planetary atmospheres stems from the different building blocks present in protoplanetary discs and from the different physical and chemical processes that these experience during the planetary assembly and evolution. This review aims to summarise, in a nutshell, the key concepts and processes operating during planet formation, with a focus on the delivery of volatiles to the inner regions of the planetary system.

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  1. If the embryo reaches a mass of \(\gtrsim0.5-0.8\)\(\text{M}_{\oplus}\) while still embedded in the gas disc, it can bind a primordial atmosphere of \(\sim 10^{-4}-10^{-2}\text{M}_{\oplus}\) (Lee and Chiang 2015). The primordial atmosphere can be lost by boil-off in the \(\sim10^{5}\) years following disc’s dispersal, depending on the planet’s mass and proximity to the star (Owen and Wu 2016).

  2. Nevertheless, Guilera et al. (2010, 2011) showed that the formation timescales are strongly reduced if giant planets form by the accretion of sub-km planetesimals, and that the simultaneous formation of Solar System giant planets can occur in only a few Myr (compatible with disc lifetimes). The prevalence of such small planetesimals at the time of planet formation is however not predicted by streaming instability simulations. (Schreiber and Klahr 2018)

  3. While Paardekooper et al. (2011) performed 2D hydrodynamical simulations, the simulations by Jiménez and Masset (2017) were performed in 3D. The main difference between the derived recipes from both authors relies in the horseshoe drag component of the corotation torque (Guilera et al. 2019).

  4. Indeed, proto-Earth must have grown large enough during the disc phase to bind a solar-composition atmosphere able to account for the present-day noble gases (Marty 2012), but small enough to be able to lose such primordial atmosphere in the course of giga-years of thermal evolution (Lammer et al. 2018).

  5. This is slightly in tension with Hf-W dating, which shows that the core formation of terrestrial planets occurred at times ≲30 Myr from the beginning of the Solar System (Kleine et al. 2002)

  6. A typical value of the pebble isolation mass at \(a\)= 5 au is ∼20 \(\text{M}_{\oplus }\) (Lambrechts et al. 2014), which is slightly larger than typical values of the critical core mass (Ikoma et al. 2000).

  7. Type-I migration is faster for more massive planets, see Sect. 2.3.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the International Space Science Institute for organising the workshop “Understanding the Diversity of Planetary Atmospheres” and the workshop participants for the encouragement to write this review/chapter. We also thank the Editor, Dr. Helmut Lammer, and the anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions which helped us to significantly improve this work. MPR acknowledges financial support provided by FONDECYT grant 3190336 and from CONICYT project Basal AFB-170002. MPR and OMG acknowledge financial support from the Iniciativa Científica Milenio (ICM) via the Núcleo Milenio de Formación Planetaria Grant. OMG is partially supported by the PICT 2016-0053 from ANPCyT, Argentina. OMG acknowledges the hosting by IA-PUC as an invited researcher.

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Correspondence to Julia Venturini.

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Understanding the Diversity of Planetary Atmospheres

Edited by François Forget, Oleg Korablev, Julia Venturini, Takeshi Imamura, Helmut Lammer and Michel Blanc

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Venturini, J., Ronco, M.P. & Guilera, O.M. Setting the Stage: Planet Formation and Volatile Delivery. Space Sci Rev 216, 86 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-020-00700-y

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