Planetary migration, accretion, and atmospheres

This dissertation explores three distinct projects in the field of planetary formation and evolution: type I migration, cessation of mass accretion, and the atmospheric dynamics of hot Jupiters. All three of these projects touch on outstanding or unresolved issues in the field. Each attempts to unify analytic and numerical approaches in order to physically motivate solutions while simultaneously probing areas currently inaccessible to purely analytic approaches.; The first section, type I migration, explores the outstanding problem of the rapid inward migration of low mass planets embedded in protoplanetary disks. Analytic estimates of migration predict characteristic timescales that are much shorter then either observed disk lifetimes or theoretical core-accretion formation timescales. If migration is actually as efficient as these analytic estimates predict, planet formation across the observed range of masses and semimajor axis' is difficult. Here I introduce several new formalisms to both allow the disk to adiabatically adjust to the presence of a planet and include the effect of axisymmetric disk self-gravity. I find that these modifications increase migration timescales by approximately 4 times. In addition to these numerical improvements, I present simulations of migration in lower sound-speed regions of the disk on the grounds that self shadowing within the disk could yield substantially cooler gas temperatures then those derived by most irradiated disk models. In such regions the planetary perturbation excites a secondary instability, leading to the formation of vortices. These vortices cause a substantial reduction in the net torque, increasing migration timescales by up to approximately 200 times the analytically predicted rate.; The second section addresses the mechanism for shutting off accretion onto giant planets. According to the conventional sequential accretion scenario, giant planets acquire a majority of their gas in a runaway phase. Conventional mechanisms for stopping this accretion involve either disk dispersal or gap formation. Although mass accretion may eventually be quenched by a global depletion of gas, as in the ease of Uranus and Neptune, such a mechanism is unlikely to have stalled the growth of some known planetary systems which contain relatively low-mass and close-in planets along with more massive and longer period companions. Similarly, the formation of a gap cannot fully explain the decrease in mass accretion. Several groups have shown that, even in the presence of a gap, diffusion allows rapid gas accretion to continue. Here I explore the effect of the growing tidal barrier on the flow within the protoplanetary disk. Using both analytic and numerical approaches I show that accretion rates increases rapidly with the ratio of the protoplanet's Roche to Bondi radii or equivalently to the disk thickness. Mass accretion timescales become comparable to observed disk lifetimes. In regions with loco geometric aspect ratios gas accretion is efficiently quenched with relatively low protoplanetary masses. This mechanism is important for determining the gas-giant planets' mass function, the distribution of their masses within multiple planet systems around solar type stars, and for suppressing the emergence of gas-giants around low mass stars.; The final section explores the atmospheric dynamics of short-period gas-giant planets. Ubiquitous among currently observed extrasolar planetary systems these planets receive intense irradiation from their host stars that dominates the energy input into their atmospheres. Characterization of several of these planets through transit observations have revealed information on temperature, structure, and composition. Here we present three-dimensional radiative hydrodynamical simulations of atmospheric circulation on close-in gas giant planets. In contrast to previous Global Climate Models and shallow water algorithms, this method does not assume quasi hydrostatic eq...