ICCUB Seminars/ GAIA Journal Club
28th of March, 2023
In this seminar, I discussed the paper on the chemistry of planet formation: UV-driven Chemistry as a Signpost for Late-stage Planet Formation.
The authors modeled the chemistry of the planet formation process taking place in the old protoplanetary disk around the Herbig Ae star HD 163296 and TW Hya over a timescale of 1 Myr. The work aimed at understanding the temporal transition happening in the chemistry of an early-stage disk witnessing planet formation.
The authors provided an alternative solution, which replaces the grain-surface chemistry, to explain the conundrum behind the abundant observations of the complex molecules CH3CN and HC3N as they should not be in the gaseous state but frozen on cold grain surfaces.
Based on the disk evolution processes linking the disk gas chemistry to planet formation, 2 ingredients would power the state of photo-chemistry equilibrium: An elevated C-to-O ratio in the gas and greater penetration of UV photons due to a reduction in the total surface area of the small grain population due to pebble formation.