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Depletion of gaseous CO in protoplanetary disks by surface-energy-regulated ice formation

Nature Astronomy volume 6, pages 1147–1155 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Empirical constraints of fundamental properties of protoplanetary disks are essential for understanding planet formation and planetary properties1,2. Carbon monoxide (CO) gas is often used to constrain disk properties3. However, estimates show that the CO gas abundance in disks is depleted relative to expected values4,5,6,7, and models of various disk processes impacting the CO abundance could not explain this depletion on observed ~1 Myr timescales8,9,10,11,12,13,14. Here we demonstrate that surface energy effects on particles in disks, such as the Kelvin effect, that arise when ice heterogeneously nucleates onto an existing particle can efficiently trap CO in its ice phase. In previous ice formation models, CO gas was released when small ice-coated particles were lofted to warmed disk layers. Our model can reproduce the observed abundance, distribution and time evolution of gaseous CO in the four most studied protoplanetary disks7. We constrain the solid and gaseous CO inventory at the midplane and disk diffusivities and resolve inconsistencies in estimates of the disk mass—three crucial parameters that control planetary formation.

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Fig. 1: The distribution of gaseous CO is regulated by preferential condensation of CO onto large particles.
Fig. 2: The radial evolution of CO in the disk around TW Hya.
Fig. 3: The amount of CO gas depletion depends on the disk diffusion timescale.
Fig. 4: Surface-energy-regulated ice formation can describe CO gas abundances for a variety of observed disks.

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Data availability

Observational CO data are published in refs. 6,7,15,71,72,73,74,75,77,78 (see Methods for more detail). Due to the large size of the data files, the full microphysical data generated by the simulations presented in this work are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The numerical models used in this work are not public. However, they are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge K. Öberg for her feedback on the surface binding properties of CO ice, S. Andrews for his insightful discussion of the outer radii of disks as measured from CO emission and J. Szulagyi for insightful discussions about the temperature structures in protoplanetary disks. This work benefited from the Exoplanet Summer Program in the Other Worlds Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a program funded by the Heising–Simons Foundation. D.P. acknowledges support from the Ford Foundation Dissertation Year Fellowship Program and support from NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51490.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. D.P. and R.M.C. acknowledge support from NSF CAREER grant number AST-1555385. R.M.C and X.Z. acknowledge support from NASA Interdisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research (ICAR) grant 80NSSC21K0597. P.G. acknowledges support from the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship sponsored by the Heising–Simons Foundation and support from NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51456.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. X.Z. acknowledges support from the NASA Solar System Workings Grant 80NSSC19K0791 and the NASA Exoplanet Research Grant 80NSSC22K0236. D.P. is an NHFP Sagan Fellow.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harvard & Smithsonian, Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Diana Powell

  2. Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC, USA

    Peter Gao

  3. Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Ruth Murray-Clay

  4. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Xi Zhang

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Contributions

D.P., P.G. and R.M.C. conceived of the project. D.P. and P.G. adapted the microphysical model of CO ice formation. D.P. coupled the radial model to the microphysical ice modelling and wrote the manuscript. D.P. and R.M.C. conceived of the concepts used in the model coupling. D.P., X.Z. and R.M.C. conceived several useful tests of the finished model. All authors provided comments used in editing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Diana Powell.

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Powell, D., Gao, P., Murray-Clay, R. et al. Depletion of gaseous CO in protoplanetary disks by surface-energy-regulated ice formation. Nat Astron 6, 1147–1155 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01741-9

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