English

Ice Lines in Circumbinary Protoplanetary Disks

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2015-06-15 v1

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_{\odot} components, this critical separation is 1.04\approx 1.04 AU, and scales weakly with mass accretion rate and Rosseland mean opacity ([M˙κR]2/9\propto [\dot{M}\kappa_R]^{2/9}). Assuming a steady mass accretion rate of M˙108Myr1\dot{M} \sim 10^{-8} {\rm M_{\odot} yr^{-1}} and a Rosseland mean opacity of κR1cm2g1\kappa_R\sim 1 {\rm cm^2 g^{-1}}, I show that 80\gtrsim 80% of all binary systems with total masses Mtot4.0MM_{\rm tot} \lesssim 4.0 M_{\odot} 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.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-06-21T23:40:15.779Z