Team Lead: Schlichting;
Members: Stewart, Isella, Dasgupta, Marty, Johns-Krull, Hassanzadeh
To understand the origin and abundance of life-essential elements in young rocky planets, we need to start by determining the composition of terrestrial planets as dictated by their formation histories and by their formation locations in the early protoplanetary disk.
With the knowledge of the chemical composition and the mass surface density of the disk from observations (Theme 1), we will determine the expected bulk composition of planetary embryos by calculating the radial extent of their feeding zones. Further, we will include giant impacts of large planetary embryos as a process of planetary growth and consequent modification of bulk COHNSP budget of rocky planets. We will determine how the initial budget of COHNSP from accretion with and without giant impacts is changed by radial drift of solids in the disk due to gas-drag. We will also tackle how the presence of giant planets in the system affects the mixing of ingredients in the inner disk and the delivery of volatiles from the outer regions.
The research in this section is targeted at answering two specific questions:
What is the abundance of life-essential ingredients of rocky planets from formation and how does this depend on the formation location in the disk and disk mass?
How do small and large impacts alter the abundance of life-essential ingredients of rocky planets?