Over the last few decades astronomers have discovered thousands of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun – known as exoplanets. Many of these exoplanets are quite unlike anything we see in our Solar System. These include ‘hot Jupiters’ orbiting very close to their parent star and rocky ‘super Earths’ many times larger than our home planet. In this free course, The formation of exoplanets, you will learn about the challenges connected with efforts to reconcile the observed exoplanet population with current theories on how planets form. The two main theories for this, namely the core-accretion scenario and the disc-instability scenario, will be explored mathematically.This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course S384 Astrophysics of stars and exoplanets.
Overview
Syllabus
- 1 Protoplanetary discs
- 1.1 Observations of protoplanetary discs
- 1.2 Modelling protoplanetary discs
- 1.3 Vertical gas-density profile
- 1.4 Radial dependence of the orbital velocity
- 2 Rising from the dust
- 2.1 From dust grains to rocks
- 2.2 Assembling the planetesimals
- 2.3 The growth of planetary cores
- 2.4 The isolation mass
- 3 The final stages of planet formation
- 3.1 Forming giant planets via core accretion
- 3.2 Super-Jupiter exoplanets
- 3.3 The disc-instability scenario
- 3.4 The Jeans mass for fragmentation
- 3.5 Migration and planet interaction
- 3.6 Comparing theory and observation
- 4 Quiz
- 5 Conclusion
