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chemcomp: Modeling The Chemical Composition Of Planets Formed In Protoplanetary Disks

By Keith Cowing
Status Report
astro-ph.IM
February 1, 2024
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chemcomp: Modeling The Chemical Composition Of Planets Formed In Protoplanetary Disks
This is an artist’s impression of a young star surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which planets are forming. An international team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to provide the first observation of water and other molecules in the inner, rocky-planet-forming regions of a disc in one of the most extreme environments in our galaxy. These results suggest that the conditions for rocky-planet  formation, typically found in the discs of low-mass star-forming regions, can also occur in massive-star-forming regions and possibly a broader range of environments. [Image description: At the centre of the image, a bright light source illuminates a surrounding disc, which transitions from colours of white, grey, to orange. The disc is slightly tilted from upper left to lower right, and has spiral features that are most prominent near the star. Small, rocky objects are scattered throughout the disc. At upper right, there is a gap through which background stars can be seen.]

Future observations of exoplanets will hopefully reveal detailed constraints on planetary compositions. Recently, we have developed and introduced chemcomp (Schneider & Bitsch 2021a), which simulates the formation of planets in viscously evolving protoplanetary disks by the accretion of pebbles and gas.

The chemical composition of planetary building blocks (pebbles and gas) is traced by including a physical approach of the evaporation and condensation of volatiles at evaporation lines. We have now open-sourced the chemcomp code to enable comparisons between planet formation models and observational constraints by the community.

The code can be found at this https URL, is easy to use (using configuration files) and comes with a detailed documentation and examples.

Aaron David Schneider, Bertram Bitsch

Comments: url: this https URL
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2401.15686 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2401.15686v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10184399
Focus to learn more
Submission history
From: Aaron Schneider
[v1] Wed, 22 Nov 2023 18:06:08 UTC (25 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15686
Astrobiology

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻