PLANETARY POPULATIONS IN THE MASS–PERIOD DIAGRAM: A STATISTICAL TREATMENT OF EXOPLANET FORMATION AND THE ROLE OF PLANET TRAPS

The rapid growth of observed exoplanets has revealed the existence of several distinct planetary populations in the mass–period diagram. Two of the most surprising are (1) the concentration of gas giants around 1 AU and (2) the accumulation of a large number of low-mass planets with tight orbits, also known as super-Earths and hot Neptunes. We have recently shown that protoplanetary disks have multiple planet traps that are characterized by orbital radii in the disks and halt rapid type I planetary migration. By coupling planet traps with the standard core accretion scenario, we showed that one can account for the positions of planets in the mass–period diagram. In this paper, we demonstrate quantitatively that most gas giants formed at planet traps tend to end up around 1 AU, with most of these being contributed by dead zones and ice lines. We also show that a large fraction of super-Earths and hot Neptunes are formed as “failed” cores of gas giants—this population being constituted by comparable contributions from dead zone and heat transition traps. Our results are based on the evolution of forming planets in an ensemble of disks where we vary only the lifetimes of disks and their mass accretion rates onto the host star. We show that a statistical treatment of the evolution of a large population of planetary cores caught in planet traps accounts for the existence of three distinct exoplanetary populations—the hot Jupiters, the more massive planets around r = 1 AU, and the short-period super-Earths and hot Neptunes. There are very few populations that feed into the large orbital radii characteristic of the imaged Jovian planet, which agrees with recent surveys. Finally, we find that low-mass planets in tight orbits become the dominant planetary population for low-mass stars (M* ⩽ 0.7 M☉).