On the Migration of Protogiant Solid Cores

The increase of computational resources has recently allowed high-resolution, three-dimensional calculations of planets embedded in gaseous protoplanetary disks. They provide estimates of the planet migration timescale that can be compared to analytical predictions. While these predictions can result in extremely short migration timescales for cores of a few Earth masses, recent numerical calculations have given an unexpected outcome: the torque acting on planets with masses between 5 and 20 M⊕ is considerably smaller than the analytic, linear estimate. These findings motivated the present work, which investigates existence and origin of this discrepancy or "offset," as we shall call it, by means of two- and three-dimensional numerical calculations. We show that the offset is indeed physical and arises from the co-orbital corotation torque, since (1) it scales with the disk vortensity gradient, (2) its asymptotic value depends on the disk viscosity, (3) it is associated to an excess of the horseshoe zone width. We show that the offset corresponds to the onset of nonlinearities of the flow around the planet, which alter the streamline topology as the planet mass increases: at low mass the flow nonlinearities are confined to the planet's Bondi sphere, whereas at larger mass the streamlines display a classical picture reminiscent of the restricted three-body problem, with a prograde circumplanetary disk inside a "Roche lobe." This behavior is of particular importance for the subcritical solid cores (M ≲ 15 M⊕) in thin (H/r ≲ 0.06) protoplanetary disks. Their migration could be significantly slowed down, or reversed, in disks with shallow surface density profiles.