English

C/O ratios in self-gravitating protoplanetary discs with dust evolution

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2025-01-15 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Elemental abundances, particularly the C/O ratio, are seen as a way to connect the composition of planetary atmospheres with planet formation scenario and the disc chemical environment. We model the chemical composition of gas and ices in a self-gravitating disc on timescales of 0.5\,Myr since its formation to study the evolution of C/O ratio due to dust dynamics and growth, and phase transitions of the volatile species. We use the thin-disc hydrodynamic code FEOSAD, which includes disc self-gravity, thermal balance, dust evolution and turbulent diffusion, and treats dust as a dynamically different and evolving component interacting with the gas. It also describes freeze-out, sublimation and advection of four volatile species: H2_2O, CO2_2, CH4_4 and CO. We demonstrate the effect of gas and dust substructures on the distribution of volatiles and C/O ratios, including the formation of multiple snowlines of one species, and point out the anticorrelation between dust-to-gas ratio and total C/O ratio emerging due to the contribution of oxygen-rich ice mantles. We identify time and spatial locations where two distinct trigger mechanisms for planet formation are operating and differentiate them by C/O ratio range: wide range of the C/O ratios of 01.40-1.4 for streaming instability, and a much narrower range 0.30.60.3-0.6 for gravitational instability (with the initial value of 0.34). This conclusion is corroborated by observations, showing that transiting exoplanets, which possibly experienced migration through a variety of disc conditions, have significantly larger spread of C/O in comparison with directly imaged exoplanets likely formed in gravitationally unstable outer disk regions. We show that the ice-phase C/O0.20.3\approx0.2-0.3 between the CO, CO2_2 and CH4_4 snowlines corresponds to the composition of the Solar system comets, that represent primordial planetesimals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.05099,
  title  = {C/O ratios in self-gravitating protoplanetary discs with dust evolution},
  author = {Tamara Molyarova and Eduard Vorobyov and Vitaly Akimkin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.05099},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

29 pages, 10 figures, 1 table; accepted for publication in PASA

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:25:43.707Z