Thermal and Photophoretic Properties of Dust Mantled Chondrules and Sorting in the Solar Nebula

TL;DR

This study models heat transfer and photophoretic forces on dust-mantled chondrules, revealing how size ratios and thermal properties influence particle sorting in the early solar system's protoplanetary disk.

Contribution

It provides a new analytical expression for photophoretic force on dust-mantled particles and demonstrates size sorting mechanisms in the solar nebula.

Findings

Photophoretic force can cause size sorting of dust mantled chondrules.

Effective thermal conductivity depends on mantle-to-chondrule size ratio.

Size ratio correlates with overall particle size in meteorites.

Abstract

Many chondrules are found to be surrounded by a fine grained rim. Supposedly, these rims were acquired from dust accreted to the chondrules in a protoplanetary disk. In numerical simulations we study the heat transfer in illuminated bare and dust mantled chondrules. The calculations consider the chondrule size, the dust mantle size, and the thermal conductivities of both components as parameters. We calculate the photophoretic force and compare the numerical results to analytical approximations. We give an expression to quantify the photophoretic force on a spherical particle in the free molecular regime to better than 2%. We describe the influence of a dust mantle on the photophoretic strength by an effective thermal conductivity of the core-mantle particle. The effective thermal conductivity significantly depends on the size ratio between mantle and chondrule but not on the absolute sizes. It also strongly depends on the thermal conductivity of the mantle with minor influence of the thermal conductivity of the chondrule. The size ratio between rim and chondrule in meteorites is found to vary systematically with overall size by other authors. Based on this, our calculations show that a photophoretic size sorting can occur for dust mantled chondrules in optically thin disks or at the evolving inner edge of the solar nebula.