Planetesimal Accretion in Binary Systems: the Effects of Gas Dissipation

Currently, one of major problems concerning planet formation theory in close binary systems is, the strong perturbation from the companion star can increase relative velocities (△V ) of planetesimals around the primary and thus hinder their growth. According to previous studies, while gas drag can reduce the △V between bodies of the same sizes by forcing orbital alignment to planetesimals, it increases the △V among bodies of different sizes. In this paper, focusing on the γ Cephei binary system, we propose a mechanism that can overcome this difficulty. We show that in a dissipating gas disk (with a typical dissipating timescale of ∼ 10−10 years), all the planetesimals eventually converge towards the same forced orbits regardless of their sizes, leading to much lower impact velocities among them. These △V decrease processes progressively increase net mass accretion and even trigger runaway growth for large bodies (radius > 15 km). The effect of size distribution of planetesimals is discussed, and found to be one of the dominant factors that determine the outcome of collisional evolution. Anyway, it can be concluded that by including the gas dissipation in the early stage of disk evolution, the conditions for planetesimal accretion become much better, and the process from planetesimal to planet-embryo can be carried out in close binary systems like γ Cephei. Subject headings: methods: numerical — planetary systems: formation