PF-08-0012

Accretion of gas giants: from 2D to 3D

Ya-Ping Li, Yi-Xian Chen, Douglas Lin

After protoplanets have acquired sufficient mass to open partial gaps in their natal protostellar disks, residual gas continues to diffuse onto horseshoe streamlines under the effect of viscous dissipation, and to meander in and out of the planets’ Hill sphere. Within the Hill sphere, the horseshoe streamlines intercept gas flow in circumplanetary disks. Gas dynamics in circumplanetary disks is essential to the formation of protoplanets, regulating the accretion and evolution of gas giants, and the observational signatures of young forming planets in protoplanetary disks. In this work, we perform a series of 2D and 3D hydrodynamics simulations to investigate the accretion dynamics around the protoplanets. The effect of planetary eccentricity and thermodynamics on the hydrodynamic flow and thus the accretion history of the protoplanets will be examined.