Ice Lines in Circumbinary Protoplanetary Disks
Abstract
I examine the position of the ice line in circumbinary disks heated by steady mass accretion and stellar irradiation and compare with the critical semi-major axis, interior to which planetary orbits are unstable. There is a critical binary separation, dependent on the binary parameters and disk properties, for which the ice line lies within the critical semi-major axis for a given binary system. For an equal mass binary comprised of 1 M components, this critical separation is AU, and scales weakly with mass accretion rate and Rosseland mean opacity (). Assuming a steady mass accretion rate of and a Rosseland mean opacity of , I show that of all binary systems with total masses have ice lines that lie interior to the critical semi-major axis. This suggests that rocky planets should not form in these systems, a prediction which can be tested by looking for planets around binaries with separations larger than the critical separation with \emph{Kepler} (difficult) and with microlensing.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1303.2655,
title = {Ice Lines in Circumbinary Protoplanetary Disks},
author = {Christian Clanton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.2655},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
5 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to ApJL