Multiple populations of extrasolar gas giants

Based on the fact that gaseous objects are preferentially observed around metal-rich host stars, most extrasolar gaseous objects discovered to date are thought to have been formed by core accretion. Here, we present 569 samples of gaseous planets and brown dwarfs found in 485 planetary systems that span three mass regimes with boundary values at 4 and 25 Jupiter-mass masses through performing cluster analyses of these samples regarding the host-star metallicity, after minimizing the impact of the selection effect of radial-velocity measurement on the cluster analysis.

The larger mass is thought to be the upper mass limit of the objects that were formed during the planetary formation processes. In contrast, the lower mass limit appears to reflect the difference between planetary formation processes around early-type and G-type stars; disk instability plays a greater role in the planetary formation process around early-type stars than that around G-type stars. Populations with masses between 4 and 25 Jupiter masses that orbit early-type stars comprise planets formed not only via the core-accretion process but also via gravitational disk instability because the population preferentially orbits metal-poor stars or is independent of the host-star metallicity.