FU Orionis outbursts, preferential recondensation of water ice, and the formation of giant planets

Abstract

Ices, including water ice, prefer to recondense onto pre-existing nuclei rather than spontaneously forming grains from a cloud of vapor. Interestingly, different potential recondensation nuclei have very different propensities to actually nucleate water ice at the temperatures associated with freeze-out in protoplanetary discs. Therefore, if a region in a disc is warmed and then recooled, water vapor should not be expected to refreeze evenly onto all available grains. Instead it will preferentially recondense onto the most favorable grains. When the recooling is slow enough, only the most favorable grains will nucleate ice, allowing them to recondense thick ice mantles. We quantify the conditions for preferential recondensation to rapidly create pebble-sized grains in protoplanetary discs and show that FU Orionis type outbursts have the appropriate cooling rates to drive pebble creation in a band about 5 astronomical units wide outside of the quiescent frost line from approximately Jupiter's orbit to Saturn's (about 4 to 10 au). Those pebbles could be of the appropriate size to proceed to planetesimal formation via the Streaming Instability, or to contribute to the growth of planetesimals through pebble accretion. We suggest that this phenomenon contributed to the formation of the gas giants in our own Solar System.

5 pages, Accepted for publication, MNRAS

References in corpus (7)

• How to form planetesimals from mm-sized chondrules and chondrule aggregates
• Imaging the water-snow line during a protostellar outburst
• Dust settling in local simulations of turbulent protoplanetary disks
• Spitzer-IRS Observations of FU Orionis Objects
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• Gravitoviscous protoplanetary disks with a dust component. V. The dynamic model for freeze-out and sublimation of volatiles
• The effect of luminosity outbursts on the protoplanetary disk dynamics
• Fast formation of large ice pebbles after FU Orionis outbursts
• Formation of super-Earths in icy dead zones around low-mass stars