Freiburg 2008 – scientific programme
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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik
EP 9: Planets and Small Bodies I
EP 9.5: Talk
Wednesday, March 5, 2008, 10:00–10:15, KGI-Aula
The complete set of gas giant structures: calculating all protoplanetary equilibria that could exist — •Christopher Broeg1, Günther Wuchterl2, and Willy Benz1 — 1Weltraum und Planetenforschung, Universität Bern, Schweiz — 2Thüringer Landessternwarte, Tautenburg, Deutschland
To characterize the planet population around different host stars at small orbital separations (up to 64 days orbital period), we have calculated structures of gas giants in this regime. We have varied the parameters in a scale-free way so that the resulting solution-set of gas-giant structures is representative of the full set of possible gas giants in any protoplanetary disk.
It turns out that there are characteristic masses for each separation, i.e. masses that are far more frequent than others in the full set of structures. This naturally leads to a classification of gas giant planets: They can be grouped into three different classes G, H, and J with distinct properties, e.g. characteristic masses at different orbital separations and for different host stars.
We applied the described method to the corot target fields. Taking into account the known distribution of star masses in the fields, we could compute the expected mass distribution for each orbital separation ranging from 1 to 64 days orbital period.