There may be Multiple Carbon monoxide Snow-lines in Protoplanetary Disks

Multiple Carbon monoxide Snow-lines in Disks Sculpted by Radial Drift

Author:

Ilsedore Cleeves

Abstract:

Observations of protoplanetary disks suggest that the gas and dust follow significantly different radial distributions. This finding can be theoretically explained by a combination of radial drift and gas drag of intermediate-sized dust grains. Using a simple parametric model to approximate the different distributions of the gas and dust components, we calculate and examine the impact of radial drift on the global dust temperature structure. We find that the removal of large grains beyond the "truncation radius" allows this region to become significantly warmer from reprocessed stellar radiation shining down from the disk upper layers, increasing the outer disk temperature by ∼10−30%. This change is sufficient to raise the local temperature to a value exceeding the CO desorption temperature. These findings imply that the disk density structures induced by radial drift are able to create multiple CO snow-lines. The inner disk CO is in the gas phase, freezing out near the classical snow-line at R∼20−40 AU. Moving outward, the CO sublimates once again beyond the truncation radius (80 AU in our models) and subsequently re-freezes out at sufficiently large stellar distances, beyond R≳130−200 AU. We find that thermal desorption of CO in the outer disk becomes competitive with external UV photodesorption and that this additional transition from solid state CO to the gas-phase has significant implications for the C/O ratio in the outer disk.