Issue |
A&A
Volume 689, September 2024
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A15 | |
Number of page(s) | 13 | |
Section | Planets and planetary systems | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202450629 | |
Published online | 27 August 2024 |
Evolution of Jupiter and Saturn with helium rain
Institut für Astrophysik, Universität Zürich,
Winterthurerstr. 190,
CH8057
Zurich,
Switzerland
e-mail: saburo.howard@uzh.ch
Received:
7
May
2024
Accepted:
12
July
2024
The phase separation between hydrogen and helium at high pressures and temperatures leads to the rainout of helium in the deep interiors of Jupiter and Saturn. This process, also known as “helium rain”, affects their long-term evolution. Modeling the evolution and internal structure of Jupiter and Saturn (and giant exoplanets) relies on the phase diagram of hydrogen and helium. In this work, we simulated the evolution of Jupiter and Saturn with helium rain by applying different phase diagrams of hydrogen and helium and we searched for models that reproduce the measured atmospheric helium abundance in the present day. We find that a consistency between Jupiter’s evolution and the Galileo measurement of its atmospheric helium abundance can only be achieved if a shift in temperature is applied to the existing phase diagrams (−1250 K, +350 K or −3850 K depending on the applied phase diagram). Next, we used the shifted phase diagrams to model Saturn’s evolution and we found consistent solutions for both planets. We confirm that de-mixing in Jupiter is modest, whereas in Saturn, the process of helium rain is significant. We find that Saturn has a large helium gradient and a helium ocean. Saturn’s atmospheric helium mass fraction is estimated to be between 0.13 and 0.16. We also investigated how the applied hydrogen-helium equation of state and the atmospheric model affect the planetary evolution, finding that the predicted cooling times can change by several hundred million years. Constraining the level of super-adiabaticity in the helium gradient formed in Jupiter and Saturn remains challenging and should be investigated in detail in future research. We conclude that further explorations of the immiscibility between hydrogen and helium are valuable as this knowledge directly affects the evolution and current structure of Jupiter and Saturn. Finally, we argue that measuring Saturn’s atmospheric helium content is crucial for constraining Saturn’s evolution as well as the hydrogen-helium phase diagram.
Key words: planets and satellites: composition / planets and satellites: gaseous planets / planets and satellites: interiors / planets and satellites: individual: Jupiter / planets and satellites: individual: Saturn
© The Authors 2024
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article is published in open access under the Subscribe to Open model. Subscribe to A&A to support open access publication.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.