Reexamination of Induction Heating of Primitive Bodies in Protoplanetary Disks

TL;DR

This paper revisits the induction heating mechanism for primitive bodies in protoplanetary disks, correcting conceptual errors, considering realistic plasma conditions, and introducing electrodynamic heating as an alternative to radionuclide heating.

Contribution

It corrects previous assumptions about electric fields in induction heating, incorporates weakly-ionized plasma conditions, and explores more realistic flow scenarios in protoplanetary disks.

Findings

Electric field inside asteroids can vanish or be significant depending on flow geometry.

Electrodynamic heating can reach comparable levels to radionuclide heating.

Corrected models show more realistic heating scenarios in protoplanetary environments.

Abstract

We reexamine the unipolar induction mechanism for heating asteroids originally proposed in a classic series of papers by Sonett and collaborators. As originally conceived, induction heating is caused by the "motional electric field" which appears in the frame of an asteroid immersed in a fully-ionized, magnetized solar wind and drives currents through its interior. However we point out that classical induction heating contains a subtle conceptual error, in consequence of which the electric field inside the asteroid was calculated incorrectly. The problem is that the motional electric field used by Sonett et al. is the electric field in the freely streaming plasma far from the asteroid; in fact the motional field vanishes at the asteroid surface for realistic assumptions about the plasma density. In this paper we revisit and improve the induction heating scenario by: (1) correcting the conceptual error by self consistently calculating the electric field in and around the boundary layer at the asteroid-plasma interface; (2) considering weakly-ionized plasmas consistent with current ideas about protoplanetary disks; and (3) considering more realistic scenarios which do not require a fully ionized, powerful T Tauri wind in the disk midplane. We present exemplary solutions for two highly idealized flows which show that the interior electric field can either vanish or be comparable to the fields predicted by classical induction depending on the flow geometry. We term the heating driven by these flows "electrodynamic heating", calculate its upper limits, and compare them to heating produced by short-lived radionuclides.