Related papers: Water/Icy Super-Earths: Giant Impacts and Maximum …
The atmosphere of a terrestrial planet that is replenished with secondary gases should have accumulated hydrogen-rich gas from its protoplanetary disk. Although a giant impact blows off a large fraction of the primordial atmosphere of a…
Models of planet formation have shown that giant planets have a large impact on the number, masses and orbits of terrestrial planets that form. In addition, they play an important role in delivering volatiles from material that formed…
Super-Earths are highly irradiated, small planets with bulk densities approximately consistent with Earth. We construct combined interior-atmosphere models of super-Earths that trace the partitioning of water throughout a planet, including…
In the late stage of terrestrial planet formation, planets are predicted to undergo pairwise collisions known as giant impacts. Here we present a high-resolution database of giant impacts for differentiated colliding bodies of iron-silicate…
Water is an important component of exoplanets, with its distribution, i.e., whether at the surface or deep inside, fundamentally influencing the planetary properties. The distribution of water in most exoplanets is determined by yet-unknown…
Water and land surfaces on a planet interact with gases in the atmosphere and with radiation from the star. These interactions define the environments that prevail on the planet, some of which may be more amenable to prebiotic chemistry,…
The field of extrasolar planets has rapidly expanded to include the detection of planets with masses smaller than that of Uranus. Many of these are expected to have little or no hydrogen and helium gas and we might find Earth analogs among…
During the formation of rocky planets, the surface environments of growing protoplanets were dramatically different from those of present-day planets. The release of gravitational energy during accretion would have maintained a molten…
We investigate the outcome of collisions in very different mass regimes, but an otherwise identical parameter setup, comprising the impact velocity ($v/v_\mathrm{esc}$), impact angle, mass ratio, and initial composition, w.r.t. simple…
Planetary systems with sufficiently small orbital spacings can experience planetary mergers and ejections. The branching ratio of mergers vs ejections depends sensitively on the treatment of planetary close encounters. Previous works have…
The ever-expanding catalog of detected super-Earths calls for theoretical studies of their properties in the case of a substantial water layer. This work considers such water planets with a range of masses and water mass fractions (2 to 5…
We present results from ab initio simulations of liquid water-hydrogen mixtures in the range from 2 to 70 GPa and from 1000 to 6000 K, covering conditions in the interiors of ice giant planets and parts of the outer envelope of gas giant…
Collisions between large, similar-sized bodies are believed to shape the final characteristics and composition of terrestrial planets. Their inventories of volatiles such as water, are either delivered or at least significantly modified by…
Ice-rich planets are formed exterior to the water ice-line and thus are expected to contain a substantial amount of ices. The high ice content leads to unique conditions in the interior, under which the structure of a planet is affected by…
Numerous exoplanets with masses ranging from Earth to Neptune and radii larger than Earth have been found through observations. These planets possess atmospheres that range in mass fractions from 1% to 30%, reflecting the diversity of…
We demonstrate that the deep volatile storage capacity of magma oceans has significant implications for the bulk composition, interior and climate state inferred from exoplanet mass and radius data. Experimental petrology provides the…
Although current sensitivity limits are such that true Solar System analogs remain challenging to detect, numerous planetary systems have been discovered that are very different from our own Solar System. The majority of systems harbor a…
Planets and stars are expected to be compositionally linked because they accrete from the same material reservoir. However, astronomical observations revealed the existence of exoplanets whose bulk density is far higher than what is…
Water (H$_{2}$O), in all forms, is an important constituent in planetary bodies, controlling habitability and influencing geological activity. Under conditions found in the interior of many planets, as the pressure increases, the H-bonds in…
Understanding the chemical interactions between water and Mg-silicates or iron is essential to constrain the interiors of water-rich planets. Hydration effects have, however, been mostly neglected by the astrophysics community so far. As…