On the water delivery to terrestrial embryos by ice pebble accretion

Abstract

Standard accretion disk models suggest that the snow line in the solar nebula migrated interior to the Earth's orbit in a late stage of nebula evolution. In this late stage, a significant amount of ice could have been delivered to 1 AU from outer regions in the form of mm to dm-sized pebbles. This raises the question why the present Earth is so depleted of water (with the ocean mass being as small as 0.023% of the Earth mass). Here we quantify the amount of icy pebbles accreted by terrestrial embryos after the migration of the snow line assuming that no mechanism halts the pebble flow in outer disk regions. We use a simplified version of the coagulation equation to calculate the formation and radial inward drift of icy pebbles in a protoplanetary disk. The pebble accretion cross section of an embryo is calculated using analytic expressions presented by recent studies. We find that the final mass and water content of terrestrial embryos strongly depends on the radial extent of the gas disk, the strength of disk turbulence, and the time at which the snow lines arrives at 1 AU. The disk's radial extent sets the lifetime of the pebble flow, while turbulence determines the density of pebbles at the midplane where the embryos reside. We find that the final water content of the embryos falls below 0.023 wt% only if the disk is compact (<100 AU), turbulence is strong at 1 AU, and the snow line arrives at 1 AU later than 2-4 Myr after disk formation. If the solar nebula extended to 300 AU, initially rocky embryos would have evolved into icy planets of 1-10 Earth masses unless the snow-line migration was slow. If the proto-Earth contained water of ∼1 wt% as might be suggested by the density deficit of the Earth's outer core, the formation of the proto-Earth was possible with weaker turbulence and with earlier (>0.5-2 Myr) snow-line migration.

Trace hydrogen in helium atmosphere white dwarfs as a possible signature of water accretion

“…It is possible that these stars hosted particularly water-rich planetary systems, which, in turn, would also explain why only a handful of these outliers have been discovered to date. Assuming MH has a planetary origin, these stars accreted up to 4.6 × 10 25 g of water, a mass close to the upper limit of the total water content of Earth (estimated to be between 0.06 and 2 per cent by mass, van Thienen et al 2007;Sato et al 2016). Accretion of the entire MH in a single event would imply large and very water rich parent bodies, i.e.…”

Satellitesimal Formation via Collisional Dust Growth in Steady Circumplanetary Disks

“…However, these particles have already grown to the pebbles (cmsized particles) until they reach around the gas planets like Jupiter (e.g. Lambrechts & Johansen 2012;Okuzumi et al 2012;Sato et al 2016), so that most of them should be dammed at the outer edge of the gas gap by the positive gas pressure gradient (e.g. Adachi et al 1976;Zhu et al 2012).…”

“…In steady state, and in the absence of fragmentation, the mass m d of the radially drifting particles is determined as a function of r by (Equation (5) of Sato et al 2016) …”

Inside-out Planet Formation. IV. Pebble Evolution and Planet Formation Timescales

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