How Late Solid Enrichment Shapes Atmospheric Abundances in Giant Planets

arXiv:2607.01466 · astro-ph.EP · Submitted 2026-07-01 · Read on arXiv

Michael L. Balogh, Yuvan Sooryakumar, Sachen Gombu, Francis J. Poulin, Pluto Jiang, Safwan Khan, Anthony Girmenia

Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics · Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo · Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo · Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo · Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo · Department of Physics, University of Guelph · Department of Physics and Astronomy, Western University

astro-ph.EP

Submitted: 2026-07-01

Comments: Accepted for publication in ApJ

Code: https://github.com/rbooth200/DiscEvolution

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Atmospheric abundance measurements of giant exoplanets are increasingly used to infer their formation histories, motivating upcoming population studies with facilities such as the ESA Ariel mission.

Terminology

Abstract

Atmospheric abundance measurements of giant exoplanets are increasingly used to infer their formation histories, motivating upcoming population studies with facilities such as the ESA Ariel mission. We present a population synthesis study of giant planet formation that combines pebble accretion, planetesimal formation with migration driven accretion, and an inheritance based chemistry model. We compare disks in which angular momentum transport is dominated either by turbulent viscosity or by magnetically driven disk winds. Wind-driven disks produce systematically more massive giant planets, but the atmospheric composition of those planets is otherwise similar to that of planets formed in viscous disks. In the absence of significant late-time solid pollution, atmospheric abundances such as C/H, O/H, and C/O retain sensitivity to the formation and migration history of simulated planets. When planetesimals efficiently enrich the envelope during migration, the abundance distributions collapse onto narrower sequences that are largely insensitive to the underlying disk accretion model. They remain correlated with formation and migration history, though with a smaller dynamic range in abundance. The resulting C/O distributions depend on planet mass in a way that agrees qualitatively well with observations, while the predicted range of C/H and O/H abundances is substantially narrower than observed. This suggests that there is a greater range in the amount of envelope pollution than represented in this simple model.

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