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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 4.

Time when a body is ejected plotted against the initial semimajor axis of the body (a0). In simulations with giant planets (left panel) planets are the larger green points and planetesimals are the small black dots. Bodies closest to Jupiter and Saturn are ejected first, beginning with ejected bodies at 4 au approximately 100,000 years into the simulation. This distribution of ejected material follows a power law. There are also two distinct clusters with a population that began exterior to 2 au being ejected first, followed by bodies that began inside 2 au, which are ejected later. This closer-in population is mostly reprocessed material that has undergone high-energy collisions. We have added a small jitter to the a0 of the planet for ease of visualization. When no giant planets are present (red dots, right panel), ejections do not start until around 100 Myr into the simulation and do not show a dependence on initial semimajor axis.

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