Related papers: Superionic silica-water and silica-hydrogen compou…
The origin of water on the Earth is a long-standing mystery, requiring a comprehensive search for hydrous compounds, stable at conditions of the deep Earth and made of Earth-abundant elements. Previous studies usually focused on the current…
We discuss our current understanding of the interior structure and thermal evolution of giant planets. This includes the gas giants, such as Jupiter and Saturn, that are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, as well as the "ice…
Aptly named, ice giants such as Uranus and Neptune contain significant amounts of water. While this water cannot be present near the cloud tops, it must be abundant in the deep interior. We investigate the likelihood of a liquid water ocean…
Uranus and Neptune, the so-called "ice giants", represent a fascinating class of planets. They are the outermost planets in the solar system with intermediate masses/sizes, complex non-polar magnetic fields, strong atmospheric winds, and…
Astrophysical measurements have shown that some stars have sufficiently high carbon-to-oxygen ratios such that the planets they host would be mainly composed of carbides instead of silicates. We studied the behavior of silicon carbide in…
The most abundant type of planet discovered in the Galaxy has no analogue in our Solar System and is believed to consist of a rocky interior with an overlying thick H2 dominated envelope. Models have predicted that the reaction between the…
Using density functional molecular dynamics simulations, we study the behavior of different hydrogen-oxygen compounds at megabar pressures and several thousands of degrees Kelvin where water has been predicted to occur in superionic form.…
The Mg-Si-O system is the major Earth and rocky planet-forming system. Here, through quantum variable-composition evolutionary structure explorations, we have discovered several unexpected stable binary and ternary compounds in the Mg-Si-O…
The ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune are assumed to contain large amounts of planetary ices such as water, methane, and ammonia. The properties of mixtures of such ices at the extreme pressures and temperatures of planetary interiors…
Uranus and Neptune are commonly considered ice giants, and it is often assumed that, in addition to a solar mix of hydrogen and helium, they contain roughly twice as much water as rock. This classical picture has led to successful models of…
The magnetic fields of the Ice Giant Planets Uranus and Neptune (U/N) are unique in the solar system. Based on a substantial database measured on Earth for representative planetary fluids at representative dynamic pressures up to 200 GPa (2…
We investigate equilibrium chemistry between molten metal and silicate, and a hydrogen-rich envelope using 18 independent reactions among 25 phase components for sub-Neptune-like exoplanets. Both reactive metal and unreactive metal…
Water is abundant in natural environments but the form it resides in planetary interiors remains uncertain. We report combined synchrotron X-ray diffraction and optical spectroscopy measurements of H2O in the laser-heated diamond anvil cell…
Most water in the universe may be superionic, and its thermodynamic and transport properties are crucial for planetary science but difficult to probe experimentally or theoretically. We use machine learning and free energy methods to…
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…
Currently, there are about 3 dozen known super-Earth (M < 10 MEarth), of which 8 are transiting planets suitable for atmospheric follow-up observations. Some of the planets are exposed to extreme temperatures as they orbit close to their…
Demixing properties of planetary major constituents influence the interior structure and evolution of planets. Comparing experimental and computational data on the miscibility of hydrogen and water to adiabatic profiles suggests phase…
Materials at high pressures and temperatures are of great interest for planetary science and astrophysics, warm dense matter physics, and inertial confinement fusion research. Planetary structure models rely on our understanding of the…
Existence of strongly bound water molecules on silicate surfaces, above the desorption temperature of water ice, has been first predicted by computational studies and recently demonstrated by laboratory experiments. Such trapped water may…
Polyhydrides have been shown to form novel structures at high pressure, which may be found in the interiors of giant planets. With density functional molecular dynamics simulations we studied the behavior of ammonium polyhydride compounds…