Dust in brown dwarfs and extra-solar planets

Abstract

Substellar objects have extremely long life-spans. The cosmological consequence for older objects are low abundances of heavy elements, which results in a wide distribution of objects over metallicity, hence over age. Within their cool atmosphere, dust clouds become a dominant feature, affecting the opacity and the remaining gas phase abundance of heavy elements. We investigate the influence of the stellar metallicity on the dust formation in substellar atmospheres and on the dust cloud structure and its feedback on the atmosphere. We utilize numerical simulations in which we solve a set of moment equations in order to determine the quasi-static dust cloud structure (DRIFT). These equations model the nucleation, the kinetic growth of composite particles, their evaporation and the gravitational settling as a stationary dust formation process. Element conservation equations augment this system of equations including the element replenishment by convective overshooting. The integration with an atmosphere code (PHOENIX) allows to determine a consistent (T, p, v_conv)-structure, and, hence, also to calculate synthetic spectra. A grid of DRIFT-PHOENIX model atmospheres was calculated for a wide range of metallicity to allow for a systematic study of atmospheric cloud structures throughout the evolution of the universe. We find dust clouds in even the most metal-poor ([M/H]=-6.0) atmosphere of brown dwarfs. Only the most massive among the youngest brown dwarfs and giant gas planets can resist dust formation. For very low heavy element abundances, a temperature inversion develops which has a drastic impact on the dust cloud structure. We further show that the dust-to-gas ratio does not scale linearly with the object's [M/H] for a given effective temperature.