Gas giants fuel their own growth by collecting pebble-sized objects and repelling larger objects like small planets and asteroids.
According to Space.com, authors of a study published in the journal Nature designed a model to simulate how gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter attract matter to them.
"This is the first model that we know about that you start out with a pretty simple structure for the solar nebula from which planets form, and end up with the giant-planet system that we see," study lead author Harold Levison, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colo., told Space.com. "They showed that the leftover pebbles from this formation process, which previously were thought to be unimportant, could actually be a huge solution to the planet-forming problem."
The researchers pointed out that a gas giant grows its mass quickly by gathering galactic pebbles, because matter that small cannot put up much resistance. For example, two objects around the same mass are more likely to not even effect one another because their gravitational pull would cancel each other out.
"The larger objects now tend to scatter the smaller ones more than the smaller ones scatter them back, so the smaller ones end up getting scattered out of the pebble disk," study co-author Katherine Kretke, Levison's SwRI colleague, told Space.com. "The bigger guy basically bullies the smaller one so they can eat all the pebbles themselves, and they can continue to grow up to form the cores of the giant planets."
