After surpassing the meter scale and growing into a few kilometers, what dominates the growth dynamics of a body?
Answer
Gravitational focusing drawing in smaller neighbors.
Once a body transitions past the meter scale and achieves a size of a few kilometers, its mass imparts sufficient inertia and gravitational influence that it begins to dominate the surrounding environment. At this point, growth shifts dramatically from being limited by surface sticking or hampered by gas drag to being governed by gravitational focusing. The growing planetesimal pulls in nearby smaller bodies, such as asteroids and comets, leading to a run-away growth process where the most massive planetesimals accumulate mass at the fastest rate, becoming the foundational elements for terrestrial worlds or giant planet cores.
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