Chemical evolution in ices on drifting, planet-forming pebbles

TL;DR

This study models how icy pebbles in protoplanetary disks chemically evolve as they drift inward, revealing that certain ice compositions change modestly while others are significantly affected over long timescales.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed chemical kinetics model for icy pebble evolution during radial drift in disks, linking chemical changes to planet formation processes.

Findings

Ice species with initial abundance >10^-5 change less than 20% over drift.

Longer drift timescales cause larger chemical changes.

Drifting pebbles show increased CO2, HCN, SO, and decreased other volatiles.

Abstract

Planets and their atmospheres are built from gas and solid material in protoplanetary disks. Recent results suggest that solid material like pebbles may contribute significantly to building up planetary atmospheres. In order to link observed exoplanet atmospheres and their compositions to their formation histories, it is important to understand how icy pebbles may change their composition when they drift radially inwards in disks. Our goal is to model the compositional evolution of ices on pebbles as they drift in disks, and track how their chemical evolution en-route changes the ice composition relative to the ice composition of the pebbles in the region where they grew from micron-sized grains. A state-of-the-art chemical kinetics code is utilised for modelling chemical evolution. This code accounts for the time-evolving sizes of the solids that drift. Chemical evolution is modelled locally for 0.1Myr at two starting radii, with the micron-sized solids growing into pebbles simultaneously. The pebbles and local gas, isolated as a parcel, is then exposed to changing physical conditions, intended to mimic the pebbles drifting inwards in the disk midplane, moving to 1 AU on three different timescales. A modelling simplification is that the pebbles are \emph{not} moved through, and exposed to new gas, but stay in the same chemical gas surroundings in all models. For ice species with initial abundances relative to hydrogen of $>10^{-5}$, such as H$_{2}$O, CO$_{2}$, CH$_{3}$OH and NH$_{3}$, the abundances change by less than 20% for both radii of origin, and for the two smaller drift timescales (10kyr and 100kyr). For less abundant ice species, and the longest drift timescale (1Myr), the changes are larger. Pebble drift chemistry generally increases the ice abundances of CO$_{2}$, HCN and SO, at the expense of decreasing abundances of other volatile molecules.