Kinetics of suprathermal hydrogen atom reactions with saturated hydrides in planetary and satellite atmospheres

Abstract

The kinetics of saturated hydrides methane (CH 4), silane (SiH 4), germane (GeH 4), ammonia (NH 3), phosphine (PH 3), arsane (AsH 3), water (H 2O), and hydrogen sulfide (H 2S) in the low-temperature atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Titan, and Triton reacting with suprathermal hydrogen atoms were investigated computationally to extract suprathermal rate constants k( E) via an inverse Laplace transformation from experimentally available thermal rate constants k( T). Our data reveal that all suprathermal rate constants range up to 10 −10 cm 3 s −1 , whereas the thermal counterparts are as low as 8×10 −73 cm 3 s −1 . These data demonstrate explicitly a significantly enhanced reactivity of photolytically generated suprathermal hydrogen atoms in the low-temperature planetary and satellite atmospheres and suggest that this hitherto unaccounted reaction class should be included by the planetary modeling community into future photochemical networks of atmospheres of outer solar system planets and their moons.