Interactions between a massive planet and a disc

Abstract

We analyse the potential migration of massive planets forming far away from an inner planetary system. For this, we follow the dynamical evolution of the orbital elements of a massive planet undergoing a dissipative process with a gas disc centred around the central sun. We use a new method for post-Newtonian, high-precision integration of planetary systems containing a central sun by splitting the forces on a particle between a dominant central force and additional perturbations. In this treatment, which allows us to integrate with a very high-accuracy close encounters, all gravitational forces are integrated directly, without resorting to any simplifying approach. After traversing the disc a number of times, the planet is finally trapped into the disc with a non-negligible eccentricity