Resumen:
One of the challenges in planetary formation models is, including the main physical phenomena in that process, to explain the diverse architectures of planetary systems observed to date. The modelling of collisions and planetesimal fragmentation is key to reproducing planetary formation and evolution correctly. Depending on the particle sizes and impact velocities, these collisions may result in different outcomes, such as growth, rebound, erosion, mass transfer, fragmentation, craterization, compaction, or grinding. Our previous works show that the inclusion of a detailed model of planetesimal fragmentation, considering different compositions and relative velocities of planetesimals, may inhibit or favour the formation of giant planet cores, drastically changing the final planetary system architectures.
However, in the planetary formation global models, the detailed modelling of these processes is extremely expensive from a computational point of view. Generally, these models include the planetesimal fragmentation process locally. In this work, we study and compare a local approximation of this process that simplifies the phenomenon numerically, significantly reducing the computing time required for our simulations. We compare these results to our detailed model of planetesimal fragmentation applied to giant planet formation and contrast it with other local approximations in the literature to determine its validity.
Currently, the large amount of observational data provides us with statistical properties of the exoplanet population and constraints for planetary formation models. Population synthesis models allow us to link these properties with the physical processes that take part in the planetary formation process. For the future, our aim is to conduct a population synthesis study that includes planetesimal fragmentation into PLANETALP, our global model of planet formation.