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An Impact-free Mechanism to Deliver Water to Terrestrial Planets and Exoplanets by Kral, Quentin; Huet, Paul; Bergez-Casalou, Camille; Thébault, Philippe; Charnoz, Sébastien; Fornasier, Sonia is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is An Impact-free Mechanism to Deliver Water to Terrestrial Planets and Exoplanets about?

To date, the most widespread scenario is that the Earth originated without water and was brought to the planet mainly due to impacts by wet asteroids coming from further out in space. However, many uncertainties remain regarding the exact processes that supply water to inner terrestrial planets. This article explores a new mechanism that would allow water to be efficiently transported to planets without impacts. We propose that primordial asteroids were icy and that when the ice sublimated, it formed a gaseous disk that could then reach planets and deliver water. We have developed a new model that follows the sublimation of asteroids and evolves the subsequent gas disk using a viscous diffusion code. We can then quantify the amount of water that can be accreted onto each planet in a self-consistent manner. We find that this new disk-delivery mechanism can explain the water content on Earth as well as on other planets. Our model shows most of the water being delivered between 20 and 30 Myr after the birth of the Sun. Our scenario implies the presence of a gaseous water disk with substantial mass for 100s Myr, which could be one of the key tracers of this mechanism. We show that such

Author

Kral, Quentin; Huet, Paul; Bergez-Casalou, Camille; Thébault, Philippe; Charnoz, Sébastien; Fornasier, Sonia

Published

2024

Language

EN