How planets grow by pebble accretion IV: Envelope opacity trends from sedimenting dust and pebbles

TL;DR

This paper models the evolution of dust and pebble sizes in planetary envelopes to understand how opacity affects planet formation, revealing that opacity varies with depth, planet mass, and accretion rate, influencing gas accretion outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed model for solid opacity in planetary envelopes considering pebble growth, sedimentation, and erosion, providing new insights into opacity trends during planet formation.

Findings

Pebble accretion can produce fully convective envelopes in low-mass, outer disk planets.

Opacity declines steeply with depth and planet mass in growth-limited regimes.

Constant opacity assumptions are invalid; opacity depends on depth and planet mass.

Abstract

The amount of nebular gas that a planet can bind is limited by its cooling rate, which is set by the opacity of its envelope. Accreting dust and pebbles contribute to the envelope opacity and, thus, influence the outcome of planet formation. Our aim is to model the size evolution and opacity contribution of solids inside planetary envelopes. We then use the resultant opacity relations to study emergent trends in planet formation. We design a model for the opacity of solids in planetary envelopes that accounts for the growth, fragmentation and erosion of pebbles during their sedimentation. We formulate analytical expressions for the opacity of pebbles and dust and map out their trends as a function of depth, planet mass, distance and accretion rate. We find that the accretion of pebbles rather than planetesimals can produce fully convective envelopes, but only in lower-mass planets that reside in the outer disk or in those that are accreting pebbles at a high rate. In these conditions, pebble sizes are limited by fragmentation and erosion, allowing them to pile up in the envelope. At higher planetary masses or reduced accretion rates, a different regime applies where the sizes of sedimenting pebbles are only limited by their rate of growth. The opacity in this growth-limited regime is much lower, steeply declines with depth and planet mass but is invariant with the pebble mass flux. Our results imply that the opacity of a forming planetary envelope can not be approximated by a value that is constant with either depth or planet mass. When applied to the Solar System, we argue that Uranus and Neptune could not have maintained a sufficiently high opacity to avoid runaway gas accretion unless they both experienced sufficiently rapid accretion of solids and formed late.