The effect of Semi-Collisional Accretion on Planetary Spins

Abstract

Planetesimal accretion during planet formation is usually treated as collisionless. Such accretion from a uniform and dynamically cold disk predicts protoplanets with slow retrograde rotation. However, if the building blocks of protoplanets, planetesimals, are small, of order of a meter in size, then they are likely to collide within the protoplanet's sphere of gravitational influence, creating a prograde accretion disk around the protoplanet. The accretion of such a disk results in the formation of protoplanets spinning in the prograde sense with the maximal spin rate allowed before centrifugal forces break them apart. As a result of semi-collisional accretion, the final spin of a planet after giant impacts is not completely random but is biased toward prograde rotation. The eventual accretion of the remaining planetesimals in the post giant-impact phase might again be in the semi-collisional regime and delivers a significant amount of additional prograde angular momentum to the terrestrial planets. We suggest that in our Solar System, semi-collisional accretion gave rise to the preference for prograde rotation observed in the terrestrial planets and perhaps the largest asteroids.