1012.5413 (Hugh F. Wilson et al.)

Erosion of icy cores in giant gas planets    [PDF]

Hugh F. Wilson, Burkhard Militzer

Using ab initio simulations we investigate whether water ice is stable in the cores of giant planets, or whether it dissolves into the layer of metallic hydrogen above. By Gibbs free energy calculations we find that for pressures between 10 and 40 Mbar the ice-hydrogen interface is unstable at temperatures above approximately 3000 K, far below the temperature of the core-mantle boundaries in Jupiter and Saturn that are of the order of 10000 K. This implies that the cores of solar and extrasolar giant planets are at least partially eroded.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.5413