Terrestrial planets planetary embryos

Chambers J. E. and Wetherill G. W. (1998) Making the terrestrial planets iV-body integrations of planetary embryos in three dimensions. Icarus 136, 304-327. 

Additional growth to form Earth-sized planets is thought to require colhsions between these planetary embryos. This is a stochastic process such that one cannot predict in any exact way the detailed growth histories for the terrestrial planets. However, with Monte Carlo simulations and more powerful computational codes the models have become quite sophisticated and yield similar and apparently robust results in terms of the kinds of timescales that must be... 

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