Thermal Behavior of Astrophysical Amorphous Molecular Ices

Abstract

Ice is a major component of astrophysical environment - from interstellar molecular clouds through protoplanetary disks to evolved solar systems. Ice and complex organic matter coexist in these environments as well, and it is thought primordial ice brought the molecules of life to Earth four billion years ago, which could have kickstarted the origin of life on Earth. To understand the journey of ice and organics from their origins to becoming a part of evolved planetary systems, it is important to complement high spatial and spectral resolution telescopes such as JWST with laboratory experimental studies that provide deeper insight into the processes that occur in these astrophysical environments. Our laboratory studies are aimed at providing this knowledge. In this article we present simultaneous mass spectrometric and infrared spectroscopic investigation on how molecular ice mixtures behave at different temperatures and how this information is critical to interpret observational data from protoplanetary disks as well as comets. We find that amorphous to crystalline water ice transformation is the most critical phenomenon that differentiates between outgassing of trapped volatiles such as CO2 vs. outgassing of pure molecular ice domains of the same in a mixed molecular ice. Crystalline water ice is found to trap only a small fraction of other volatiles (<5%), indicating ice grain composition in astrophysical and planetary environments must be different depending on whether the ice is in amorphous phase or transformed into crystalline phase, even if the crystalline ice undergoes radiation-induced amorphization subsequently. Crystallization of water ice is a key differentiator for many ices in astronomical environments as well as in our Solar System.

Published in Royal Society of Chemistry Faraday Discussions, 2023

References in corpus (15)

• The cometary composition of a protoplanetary disk as revealed by complex cyanides
• Complex organic molecules in protoplanetary disks
• The Active Centaurs
• On the Location of the Snow Line in a Protoplanetary Disk
• Protoplanetary disk rings and gaps across ages and luminosities
• Desorption of CO and O2 interstellar ice analogs
• Thermal desorption of circumstellar and cometary ice analogs
• The Role of Ice Compositions for Snowlines and the C/N/O Ratios in Active Disks
• Time evolution of snow regions and planet traps in an evolving protoplanetary disk
• Detections of trans-Neptunian ice in protoplanetary disks
• Interstellar ice analogs: band strengths of H${}_2$O, CO${}_2$, CH${}_3$OH, and NH${}_3$ in the far-infrared region
• Modelling the water and carbon dioxide production rates of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
• Snow-lines as probes of turbulent diffusion in protoplanetary discs
• Ice Age : Chemo-dynamical modeling of Cha-MMS1 to predict new solid-phase species for detection with JWST
• Laboratory spectroscopy of theoretical ices: Predictions for JWST and test for astrochemical models

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Phase and morphology of water-ice grains formed in a cryogenic laboratory plasma