It is generally accepted that [the] terrestrial planets and the cores
of [the] Jovian planets are [are 
were] formed through the accretion
of many small bodies called planetesimals. The accretion process is
rather complex, since several competing physical mechanisms are
working simultaneously
Lissauer1993see e.g.. In particular, the interplay of
the velocity distribution and the mass distribution is quite
complex.
There had [had 
have] been several numerical studies of [the]
accretion process, in which the coupling between the evolution of the
velocity distribution and the mass distribution was taken into
account. The importance of the coupling was first pointed out by
Greenberg1978. WetherillStewart1989
used the ``particle-in-a-box'' approach with various assumptions for
the velocity distribution to study the coupling. They found the
[delete ``the''] ``runaway growth'' of massive planetesimals in the
simulations which included the effect of the energy equipartition.
KokuboIda1996 performed full three-dimensional N-body simulations of the planetary accretion process, and confirmed that the [delete ``the''] runaway growth takes place. They also found that the mass distribution first relaxes to the power-law form
with 
, for the mass range covered by their
calculation (
). Here, 
gives the surface number density of planetesimals with the [delete
``the''] mass between m and m + dm. Earlier studies based on more
approximate theory (Wetherill and Stewart 1989, 1993, Barge and Pellat
1991, 1993) also showed similar results for that mass range. On the
other hand, in the case of two-dimensional simulation[s], no simple
power-law mass distribution was realized.
It should be noted that this range of the [delete ``the''] mass
contains most of the mass when the runaway takes place. For the mass
[``the mass'' 
``masses''] less than 
, planetesimals
exhibit orderly growth, because the condition for the run[a]way is not
satisfied
OhtsukiIda1990 e.g..
In addition, this power-law mass distribution is realized almost immediately once the run[a]way starts. Therefore, the same mechanism which drives the runaway growth should be responsible for this power law mass distribution. However, no theoretical explanation has been proposed yet.
In this paper, we present an exact stationary solution of the coagulation equation which explains why the power-law mass distribution is realized in the early stage of the accretion process. In section 2, we derive the exact stationary solution of the coagulation equation. In section 3[,] we present a more intuitive description of the mechanism of the formation of the power-law distribution. In section 4, we discuss the implication[s] of our result.
