Planetary Formation Tracks On The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram: Visualising The Processes Of Giant Planet Growth

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (HRD) is central to stellar astrophysics but has rarely been used to interpret planet formation.

We extend the HRD concept to forming planets and study how solid and gas accretion, cooling/contraction, and migration shape luminosity-temperature tracks in different formation scenarios.

We compute planetary interior structures throughout formation and evolution with the Bern model and, for the first time, couple it to radiation-hydrodynamical simulations to obtain a time-dependent accretion-shock heating efficiency, helping to address the cold-/hot-start ambiguity.

Planetary HRDs exhibit three branches corresponding to successive phases:

(i) an ascending branch during solid-dominated growth, strongly set by the size of accreted bodies (and thus the solid accretion rate) and by migration; for in-situ planetesimal accretion we find analytically L∝T8.

(ii) A near-horizontal branch beginning at detachment when gas accretion becomes disk-limited and contraction accelerates; hot accretion, higher masses, and pebble accretion bend tracks upward. Increasing electron degeneracy after detachment lowers interior temperatures and stabilises radii.

(iii) A descending branch where accretion ends and planets join constant-mass cooling tracks with weak radius evolution and L∼T4. Our tracks agree well with synthetic populations and are broadly consistent with directly imaged planets.

Populating the short-lived early branches observationally will be difficult, and embedded accreting planets require models including accretion-shock emission and circumplanetary-disk reprocessing.

Benedikt Gottstein, Gabriel-Dominique Marleau, Christoph Mordasini

Comments: 21 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in A&A
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.18950 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2605.18950v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.18950
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Submission history
From: Benedikt Gottstein
[v1] Mon, 18 May 2026 18:00:02 UTC (10,214 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18950

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