It is thought that the collisions of planetesimals created a few hundred larger planetary embryos. Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, they collided with one another. The exact sequence whereby planetary embryos collided to assemble the planets is not known, but it is thought that initial collisions would have replaced the first "generation" of embryos with a second generation consisting of fewer but larger embryos. These in their turn would have collided to create a third generation of fewer but even larger embryos. Eventually, only a handful of embryos were left, which collided to complete the assembly of the planets proper.
In the inner Solar System, the three protoplanets to survive more-or-less intact are the asteroids Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta. Psyche is likely the survivor of a violent hit-and-run with another object that stripped off the outer, rocky layers of a protoplanet. The asteroid Metis may also have a similar origin history to that of Psyche. The asteroid Lutetia also has characteristics that resemble a protoplanet. Kuiper-belt dwarf planets have also been referred to as protoplanets. Because iron meteorites have been found on Earth, it is deemed likely that there once were other metal-cored protoplanets in the asteroid belt that since have been disrupted and that are the source of these meteorites.
In February 2013 astronomers made the first direct observation of a candidate protoplanet forming in a disk of gas and dust around a distant star, HD 100546. Subsequent observations suggest that several protoplanets may be present in the gas disk.
Another protoplanet, AB Aur b, may be in the earliest observed stage of formation for a gas giant. It is located in the gas disk of the star AB Aurigae. AB Aur b is among the largest exoplanets identified, and has a distant orbit, three times as far as Neptune is from the Earth's sun. Observations of AB Aur b may challenge conventional thinking about how planets are formed. It was viewed by the Subaru Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope.
The confident detection of protoplanets is difficult. Protoplanets usually exist in gas-rich protoplanetary disks. Such disks can produce over-densities by a process called disk fragmentation. Such fragments can be small enough to be unresolved and mimic the appearance of a protoplanet. A number of unconfirmed protoplanet candidates are known and some detections were later questioned.
List of unconfirmed/disputed/refuted protoplanets
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