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The Demographics of Rocky Free-floating Planets and their Detectability by WFIRST

  • Authors: Thomas Barclay, Elisa V. Quintana, Sean N. Raymond, and Matthew T. Penny

2017 The Astrophysical Journal 841 86.

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 2.

Distributions of ejection times for simulations with giant planets (green) and without giant planets (red) shown as a function of the number of bodies ejected per star (upper panel) and the mass per star. The bin-widths are logarithmic. The dark green bins show the bodies we define as planets. The number of ejections in simulations with giant planets has two peaks in log-space, at about 106 and 108 Myr. Ejections occur frequently early on in systems with giant planets, and the number of ejections decreases with time. Without giant planets, ejections are rare for the first several hundred million years, but thereafter, the number of ejections occurs at a relatively constant rate, dropping by a factor of two from 0.5 to 2 Gyr. The bimodal distribution of ejections from the upper panel is evident in the lower panel, with ejections of both planets and planetesimals comprising the first peak around 106 Myr and only ejections of low-mass planetesimals and fragments from collisions in the second peak.

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