Late gas released in the young Kuiper belt could have significantly contributed to the carbon enrichment of the atmospheres of Neptune and Uranus

TL;DR

This paper proposes that late gas released from a primordial, gas-rich Kuiper belt could have significantly enriched the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune with carbon, offering a new explanation for their high C/H ratios.

Contribution

It introduces a model estimating how late gas accretion from a gas-rich Kuiper belt could explain the carbon enrichment of ice giants, a scenario applicable to other planetary systems.

Findings

Significant CO gas accretion onto Uranus and Neptune from a massive Kuiper belt.

A gas-rich Kuiper belt could have existed in the early Solar System.

This process could universally enrich outer planets in other systems.

Abstract

Exo-Kuiper belts have been observed for decades, but the recent detection of gas in some of them may change our view of the Solar System's youth. Late gas produced by the sublimation of CO (or CO$_2$) ices after the dissipation of the primordial gas could be the norm in young planetesimal belts. Hence, a gas-rich Kuiper belt could have been present in the Solar System. The high C/H ratios observed on Uranus and Neptune could be a clue to the existence of such late gas that could have been accreted onto young icy giants. The aim of this paper is to estimate the carbon enrichment of the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune caused by the accretion of the gas released from a putative gas-rich Kuiper belt. We find that assuming a primordial Kuiper belt with a mass of tens of earth masses leads to significant CO gas accretion onto the giants, which can lead to high C/H ratios, especially for Uranus and Neptune. Our model shows that a relatively massive gas-rich Kuiper belt could have existed in the Solar System's youth, significantly enriching the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune with carbon. Late gas accretion and its effect on outer giant planets metallicities could be a universal scenario, also occurring in extrasolar systems. Observations of sub-Jupiter exoplanets could provide very useful information to better constrain this scenario, with an enrichment in carbon and oxygen (for warm-enough planets) compared to other elements that should be inversely proportional to their envelope mass.