Constraints on the Mass of a Habitable Planet with Water of Nebular Origin
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From an astrobiological point of view, special attention has been paid to the probability of habitable planets in extrasolar systems. The purpose of this study is to constrain a possible range of the mass of a terrestrial planet that can get water. We focus on the process of water production through oxidation of atmospheric hydrogen—the nebular gas having been attracted gravitationally—by oxides available at the planetary surface. For the water production to work well on a planet, a sufficient amount of hydrogen and a temperature high enough to melt the planetary surface are needed. We have simulated the structure of the atmosphere that connects with the protoplanetary nebula for wide ranges of the heat flux, the opacity, and the density of the nebular gas. We have found that both requirements are fulfilled for an Earth-mass planet for wide ranges of the parameters. We have also found that the surface temperature of planets of ≤0.3ME (where ME is Earth's mass) is lower than the melting temperature of silicate (~1500 K). On the other hand, a planet of more than several ME becomes a gas giant through runaway accretion of the nebular gas.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6916a42e218273d727560c078fbe5dec149ed682
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- The naked planet Earth: Most essential pre-requisite for the origin and evolution of life (2013, background): “the vapor form from the disc gas, the amount is tiny compared to the present mass of the Earth’s oceans, unless a significant amount of oxygen was supplied by the magma ocean (Ikoma and Genda, 2006).”
- Emergence of a Habitable Planet (2007, background): “More recently Ikoma and Genda (2006), using more realistic opacities, revised the theoretical surface temperature of Earth’s primary atmosphere downward to ∼3,000 K.”
- Origin and evolution of the atmospheres of early Venus, Earth and Mars (2018, background): “Due to the huge number of exoplanets confirmed in recent years (e.g., Pollacco et al. 2006; Bakos et al. 2004; Auvergne et al. 2009; Borucki et al. 2010; Howe et al. 2014), a large population of planets with masses slightly larger than Solar System terrestrial planets but with over-sized radii, indi”
- HYDROGEN GREENHOUSE PLANETS BEYOND THE HABITABLE ZONE (2011, background): “If the gas opacity is supplied by heavy elements and is pressure-independent, the atmosphere mass is inversely proportional to the accretion luminosity (Stevenson 1982; Ikoma & Genda 2006; Rafikov 2006).”
- Building the terrestrial planets: Constrained accretion in the inner Solar System (2009, background): “In this model, Earth’s water was delivered in part from hydrated asteroidal material, but mainly from adsorption of small silicate grains (Muralidharan et al. 2008), cometary impacts (Owen & Bar-nun 1995) or oxidation of a H-rich primitive atmosphere (Ikoma & Genda 2006).”
- Water loss from terrestrial planets orbiting ultracool dwarfs: implications for the planets of TRAPPIST-1 (2016, background): “If all the incoming FUV photons do photolyse H2O molecules with a 100% efficiency ( α = 1) and all the resulting hydrogen atoms remain available for the escape process then photolysis does not appear to be limiting the loss process.”
- Composition and fate of short-period super-Earths: The case of CoRoT-7b (2009, unknown): “However, we believe that this is very unlikely for two reasons: First, a planet that massive should accrete some hydrogen and helium (Ikoma & Genda, 2006), and even only a few bars of these species would mean that water would still be in vapor form in the interior at smaller effective temperatures…”
- Building Terrestrial Planets (2012, background): “ not present in sufficient quantities in the local planetesimals and embryos around 1 AU, there are three potential sources for the origin of water on Earth. The first model invokes a nebular origin. Ikoma and Genda (2006) assumed that at the end of the Earth’s formation there was still some nebular”
- The Cosmic Shoreline: The Evidence that Escape Determines which Planets Have Atmospheres, and what this May Mean for Proxima Centauri B (2017, background): “Such a model may also be relevant to Hayashi-like primary nebular atmospheres, as it is reasonable to anticipate chemical equilibration and exchange between H2, H2O, and silicates at the surface if the atmosphere is deep (Hayashi et al. 1979; Sekiya et al. 1980a, 1981; Ikoma and Genda 2006).”
- The sulfur content of volcanic gases on Mars (2009, background): “This however heavily depends on assumptions of the initial volatile inventory of early Mars on which there is no clear consensus ([Pepin, 2006] and [Ikoma and Genda, 2006]).”
- Origin and loss of nebula-captured hydrogen envelopes from ‘sub’- to ‘super-Earths’ in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars (2014, background): “More recently, Ikoma and Genda (2006) improved these earlier results by adopting a more realistic equation of state and opacities, as well as an extended parameter space.”