The Growth of Planetary Embryos: Orderly, Runaway, or Oligarchic?
The Growth of Planetary Embryos: Orderly, Runaway, or Oligarchic?
We consider the growth of a protoplanetary embryo embedded in a planetesimal disk. We take into account the dynamical evolution of the disk caused by (1) planetesimal-planetesimal interactions, which increase random motions and smooth gradients in the disk, and (2) gravitational scattering of planetesimals by the embryo, which tends to …