Origins of Giant Planets, Volume 1 (ePub)

Origins of Giant Planets is a comprehensive overview of giant planet formation aimed at new researchers in the field. With the capability of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to push the mass limit for direct imaging of young planets down to Saturn's scale, observations within the next ten years are likely to bring meaningful constraints to models of giant planet formation.

Volume one covers protoplanetary disk theory, dynamics of planet-forming dust and ice, collisional grain growth, and planetesimal formation. All theoretical models are benchmarked against empirical knowledge gleaned from disk observations, laboratory research, meteoritics, and solar system dynamics. After reading this book, students and postdocs will be ready to start their own original research into planet formation. Origins of Giant Planets is also a useful reference for senior researchers seeking interdisciplinary connections between astrophysics, planetary science, and cosmochemistry.

Key Features:

• Provides a comprehensive overview of giant planet formation
• All theories are compared with observational constraints
• Suggests productive avenues for future research
• Includes discussions of chemistry as well as gravitational dynamics and thermal physics
• Well timed to be available to JWST observers

Sarah Dodson-Robinson undertaking is all the more remarkable as a tour de force because this is only volume one of two. She follows giant-planet formation through the gas-dominated stages of cloud contraction into protoplanetary discs, condensation to dust and pebbles, and then into rubble-pile planetesimals. The effects of self-gravity, mutual gravitational interactions, and orbital migration are deferred until the second volume, although the final chapter steps across that threshold in discussing the Martian hafnium and tungsten isotopic record as tracers of the timing of embryo growth. Even though the theme is giant-planet origins, inevitably there is much of relevance to rocky planets, meteorites, and the Kuiper Belt too. All chapters, after the entertaining introductory history-of-ideas chapter, abound in generally rather complicated equations. Dodson-Robinson writes well and engagingly, especially given the burden of all the equations. This is not a book for the mathematically faint of heart, but there are boxes that take the reader aside for a generally more 'friendly' chat. I particularly appreciated the four pages of Box 3.1 that describe and summarize the size progression of giant planet fore-runners including the stages of planetesimal collisions and/or pebble accretion and then gas accretion that will feature in Volume 2. Citations of peer-reviewed papers abound in the text, and each chapter concludes with several pages of references so that this book would provide a good entry into the field for new researchers. I would expect it to have a decade long useful life in institutional libraries. It is well illustrated, mostly in colour.
David Rothery, The Observatory, October 2022