Water formation in early solar nebula: I. Quasi-stationary cloud core

Abstract

An important condition for the habitability of rocky planets is the existence of water in or on their upper lithospheric layer. We will show that the available amount of this water depends on the conditions in the parental cloud the planetary system has formed from. These clouds can be giant gas clusters with a complex structure associated with bright nebulae or smaller gas aggregations appearing as quiescent dark regions. It has been observed that in both cloud types young stars are formed in dense cores consisting mainly of molecular hydrogen. We assume that the physical and chemical state of these cores, which defines the initial conditions of star formation, is also representative for the initial state of the solar nebula 4.6 Giga years ago. Based on this assumption, we have developed a radial symmetric model to study the physical and chemical evolution of the earliest period of the solar nebula described by a cloud core with 1.01 solar mass and a radius of about 104 AU. The evolution of this core is simulated for a few Mega years, while its molecular gas being in a hydrostatic equilibrium. The related radial distributions of the gas and dust temperature can be calculated from thermal balance equations. These equations depend on the radial profile of the dust to gas density which follows from the continuity equation of the dust phase. The velocity of the dust grains is influenced by the radiation pressure of the local interstellar radiation field and the gas drag. The resulting temperature and dust profiles derived from our model depend on the grain size distribution of the dust. These profiles determine the chemical evolution of the cloud core. It is shown that in the dust phase about 10^6 to 10^7 times more water is produced than in the gas phase. Further, the total mass of the water formed in the core varies only marginally between 0.11 and 0.12 wt% for a life time of the core between 1 and 6.5 Mega years, respectively. Roughly 84% of the oxygen atoms are incorporated into water molecules, if the intensity of the radiation field is about 1 Habing. The number of oxygen atoms decreases to 77% if this intensity triples. The water amount produced in the gas phase depends stronger on the interstellar radiation field and the living time of the core than the water amount formed on dust. For the 1 Habing radiation intensity the size distribution of the dust grains has nearly no influence. Finally, a number of species representing compounds mainly formed in the dust or in the gas phase was selected (H2O, CO, etc.) in order to use them for a validation of our model. Thereto, we have compared the abundances of these compounds simulated with the model to the related data from observations published in the literature. For almost all cases except N2H+ a sufficient agreement was found.