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Magnetic Fields and Accreting Giant Planets around PDS 70
  • Yasuhiro Hasegawa
Yasuhiro Hasegawa
JPL/Caltech

Corresponding Author:yasuhiro.hasegawa@jpl.nasa.gov

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Abstract

The recent high spatial/spectral resolution observations have enabled constraining formation mechanisms of giant planets, especially at the final stages. The current interpretation of such observations is that these planets undergo magnetospheric accretion, suggesting the importance of planetary magnetic fields. We explore the properties of accreting, magnetized giant planets surrounded by their circumplanetary disks, using the physical parameters inferred for PDS 70 b/c. We compute the magnetic field strength and the resulting spin rate of giant planets, and find that these planets may possess magnetic dipole fields of either a few 10 G or a few 100 G; the former is the natural outcome of planetary growth and radius evolution, while the resulting spin rate cannot reproduce the observations. For the latter, a consistent picture can be drawn, where strong magnetic fields induced by hot planetary interiors, lead both to magnetospheric accretion and to spin-down due to disk locking. We also compute the properties of circumplanetary disks in the vicinity of these planets, taking into account planetary magnetic fields. The resulting surface density lies between the predictions of two empirically derived models of circumplanetary disks:the minimum mass subnebula model and the gas-starved model. Our model predicts a positive gradient of the surface density, which invokes the traps for both satellite migration and radially drifting dust particles. This work thus concludes that the final formation stages of giant planets are similar to those of low-mass stars such as brown dwarfs, as suggested by recent studies.
01 Dec 2021Published in The Astrophysical Journal volume 923 issue 1 on pages 27. 10.3847/1538-4357/ac257b