AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 98. Low Mass Stars and Brown Dwarfs
Display, Saturday, January 9, 1999, 9:20am-4:00pm, Exhibit Hall 1

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[98.10] Planet Formation by Parker Instability

Wenchien Chou, Toshiki Tajima, Koichi Noguchi (U. Texas), Kazunari Shibata (NAOJ)

More than a dozen of extra-solar planets have been found so far. These discoveries lead us to believe that planetary systems, like our own solar system, are common in the universe. One difficulty with the current model for the origin of planets and the solar system, the so-called core-accumulation model, is that the time to produce a giant protoplanet in the outer nebula would be too long. Here we suggest a new scenario that may solve this difficulty: in a magnetized protostellar nebula the Parker-Jeans instability (self-gravitional magnetic buoyancy instability) creates dense gas blobs (which may be regarded as planetesimals) in a relativily short time scale. This magnetic instability may act in concert with the standard core-accumulation scenario to build up the masses of giant planets. Our 3D self-garvitational MHD simulation will elucidate the process we raise.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: chou@spica.c.chiba-u.ac.jp

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