Accretion of Jupiter's atmosphere from a supernova-contaminated molecular cloud

TL;DR

This paper proposes that Jupiter's atmospheric enrichment in heavy elements can be explained by the accretion of supernova ejecta during the Solar System's formation, challenging the traditional well-mixed nebula model.

Contribution

It introduces a heterogenous accretion model where Jupiter's atmosphere gains enriched material from supernova remnants, explaining observed elemental variations.

Findings

Jupiter's atmospheric composition can be explained by accreting supernova ejecta.

The model accounts for observed elemental enrichment without requiring extremely cold conditions.

Results align with isotopic anomalies indicating multiple material reservoirs during Solar System formation.

Abstract

If Jupiter and the Sun both formed directly from the same well-mixed proto-solar nebula, then their atmospheric compositions should be similar. However, direct sampling of Jupiter's troposphere indicates that it is enriched in elements such as C, N, S, Ar, Kr, and Xe by 2-6 times relative to the Sun. Most existing models to explain this enrichment require an extremely cold proto-solar nebula which allows these heavy elements to condense, and cannot easily explain the observed variations between these species. We find that Jupiter's atmospheric composition may be explained if the Solar System's disk heterogeneously accretes small amounts of enriched material such as supernova ejecta from the interstellar medium during Jupiter's formation. Our results are similar to, but substantially larger than, isotopic anomalies in terrestrial material that indicate the Solar System formed from multiple distinct reservoirs of material simultaneously with one or more nearby supernovae. Such temporal and spatial heterogeneities could have been common at the time of the Solar System's formation, rather than the cloud having a purely well-mixed `solar nebula' composition.