Evolution of Jupiter and Saturn with helium rain

TL;DR

This study models the evolution of Jupiter and Saturn considering helium rain, revealing the importance of phase diagram shifts, and highlights the impact of helium gradients and atmospheric helium measurements on understanding their internal structures.

Contribution

It introduces adjusted hydrogen-helium phase diagrams to better match observational data and explores the effects of helium rain on planetary evolution and internal composition.

Findings

Consistency with Jupiter's atmospheric helium requires phase diagram shifts.

Saturn exhibits a significant helium rain and a helium ocean.

Predicted cooling times vary with different equations of state and models.

Abstract

Phase separation between hydrogen and helium at high pressures and temperatures leads to the rainout of helium in the deep interiors of Jupiter and Saturn. This process, also known as "helium rain", affects their long-term evolution. Therefore, modelling the evolution and internal structure of Jupiter and Saturn (and giant exoplanets) relies on the phase diagram of hydrogen and helium. In this work, we simulate the evolution of Jupiter and Saturn with helium rain by applying different phase diagrams of hydrogen and helium. We find that consistency between Jupiter s evolution and the Galileo measurement of its atmospheric helium abundance is achieved only if a shift in temperature in the existing phase diagrams is applied (-1250 K, +350 K or -3850 K depending on the used phase diagram). We next use the shifted phase diagrams to model Saturn s evolution and find consistent solutions for both planets. We confirm that demixing in Jupiter is modest while in Saturn, the process of helium rain is significant. We find that Saturn has a large helium gradient and a helium ocean. Saturn s atmospheric helium mass fraction is estimated to be between 0.13 and 0.16. We also investigate how the used hydrogen-helium equation of state and atmospheric model affect the planetary evolution and find that the predicted cooling times can change by several hundred million years. Constraining the level of super-adiabaticity in the helium gradient formed in Jupiter and Saturn remains challenging and should be investigated in detail in future research. We conclude that further explorations of the immiscibility between hydrogen and helium are valuable as this knowledge directly affects the evolution and current-state structure of Jupiter and Saturn. Finally, we argue that measuring Saturn s atmospheric helium content is crucial for constraining Saturn s evolution as well as the hydrogen-helium phase diagram.