Fossilized condensation lines in the Solar System protoplanetary disk

By A. Morbidelli, B. Bitsch, A. Crida, M. Gounelle, T. Guillot, Seth Andrew Jacobson, Anders Johansen, Michiel Lambrechts, Elena Lega. 2015

163 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The terrestrial planets and the asteroids dominant in the inner asteroid belt are water poor. However, in the protoplan-etary disk the temperature should have decreased below water-condensation level well before the disk was photo-evaporated. Thus, the global water depletion of the inner Solar System is puzzling. We show that, even if the inner disk becomes cold, there cannot be direct condensation of water. This is because the snowline moves towards the Sun more slowly than the gas itself. Thus the gas in the vicinity of the snowline always comes from farther out, where it should have already condensed, and therefore it should be dry. The appearance of ice in a range of heliocentric distances swept by the snowline can only be due to the radial drift of icy particles from the outer disk. However, if a planet with a mass larger than 20 Earth mass is present, the radial drift of particles is interrupted, because such a planet gives the disk a super-Keplerian rotation just outside of its own orbit. From this result, we propose that the precursor of Jupiter achieved this threshold mass when the snowline was still around 3 AU. This effectively fossilized the snowline at that location. In fact, even if it cooled later, the disk inside of Jupiter's orbit remained ice-depleted because the flow of icy particles from the outer system was intercepted by the planet. This scenario predicts that planetary systems without giant planets should be much more rich in water in their inner regions than our system. We also show that the inner edge of the planetesimal disk at 0.7 AU, required in terrestrial planet formation models to explain the small mass of Mercury and the absence of planets inside of its orbit, could be due to the silicate condensation line, fossilized at the end of the phase of streaming instability that generated the planetesimal seeds. Thus, when the disk cooled, silicate particles started to drift inwards of 0.7 AU without being sublimated, but they could not be accreted by any pre-existing planetesimals.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73ac4167aaa3d5499b6187b964be85f9b842db61

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Citations in the corpus

Why do protoplanetary disks appear not massive enough to form the known exoplanet population? (2018, background): “However, it is expected that the formation of planetary cores is highly inefficient, with ∼350 M⊕ of pebbles needed to grow the core of Jupiter from half a lunar mass to 20 M⊕ (e.g., Morbidelli et al. 2016).”
The Effect of Jupiter's Formation on the Distribution of Refractory Elements and Inclusions in Meteorites (2017, background): “…of water ice in different regions, but such a calculation could be used to test the model further, and to test the “fossil snow line” hypothesis of Morbidelli et al. (2016), which states that the inner solar system was in many regions cold enough for ice to condense, but depleted in water…”
Planetesimal formation near the snowline: in or out? (2017, background): “The early formation of a protoplanet near the snowline might provide a solution to this problem, as proposed recently by Morbidelli et al. (2016).”
Formation of planetary systems by pebble accretion and migration (2018, background): “…based on the assumption that the initial embryo seeds emerged early in the disc lifetime outside of the silicate sublimation front, which could have been as far out as 0.5 AU away from the host star, when gas accretion rates onto the star were of the order of 10−7 M yr−1 (Morbidelli et al. 2016).”
The Non-carbonaceous–Carbonaceous Meteorite Dichotomy (2020, background): “A plausible mechanism to efficiently separate two disk reservoirs for an extended period of time is the accretion of a giant planet in between them, generating a gap within the disk and inhibiting the inward drift of dust grains (e.g., Morbidelli et al. 2016).”
Breaking the chains: hot super-Earth systems from migration and disruption of compact resonant chains (2017, methodology): “The drift-then-assembly models (Boley & Ford 2013; Boley et al. 2014; Chatterjee & Tan 2014, 2015; Hu et al. 2016) are quite promising but what actually happens near the inner edge of the disc, which is dangerously close to the sublimation line of silicates, is not clear (Morbidelli et al. 2016).”
Origin of water in the inner Solar System: Planetesimals scattered inward during Jupiter and Saturn's rapid gas accretion (2017, background): “, 2014), disconnecting the condensation temperature from the presence of water (Morbidelli et al., 2016).”
Pebble-isolation mass: Scaling law and implications for the formation of super-Earths and gas giants (2018, background): “We used a disc lifetime of 3 Myr.”