It’s Getting Hot in Here: The Effect of Giant Planet Core Formation on Surrounding Protoplanetary Disk Solids

High resolution telescopes such as ALMA and the VLT have allowed a direct look at the formation process of giant planets, yielding observations of circumplanetary disk and young giant planet candidates. While observations of forming giant planets provide insight into giant planet origins, the composition of the environment around forming giant planets is also important. Due to their rapid accretion of materials, forming giant planets release a large amount of energy into their environments in the form of heat. While the chemical effect of this local heating by young Jupiter-sized giant planets on the surrounding gas has been studied by Cleeves et al. (2015), the chemical effects of localized heating from forming giant planets on solid materials in the surrounding area have not yet been investigated.

In our work, we explore the temperature effect of forming giant planets on the surrounding protoplanetary disk environment and the resulting chemical effect on surrounding solid material. We do this by first mapping the dynamic evolution of particles of various sizes using equations of motion including drag force from the surrounding gas on the particles. The resulting dynamic track is then used to calculate the temperature environments the particle experiences as it moves through the disk factoring in contributions from the central star and the planetary core. Finally, the effect of the temperature environments on thermal dissociation of the particle ice mantle is calculated at each time step.

We find that heating from the forming giant planet can cause various degrees of ice mantle loss depending on initial starting position of the particle and orbital separation of the giant planet core from the central star. In this talk, we will summarize the dependence of particle volatile depletion on particle radius, giant planet core orbital separation, protoplanetary disk material opacity, and giant planet core mass accretion rate. We also quantify the particle flux percentage chemically affected by the thermal effects from the giant planet core as well as determine what percentage of affected particles are accreted by the giant planet core.