Nitrogen as a Tracer of Giant Planet Formation. I. A Universal Deep Adiabatic Profile and Semianalytical Predictions of Disequilibrium Ammonia Abundances in Warm Exoplanetary Atmospheres

Abstract

A major motivation of spectroscopic observations of giant exoplanets is to unveil planet formation processes from atmospheric compositions. Several recent studies suggested that atmospheric nitrogen, like carbon and oxygen, can provide important constraints on planetary formation environments. Since nitrogen chemistry can be far from thermochemical equilibrium in warm atmospheres, we extensively investigate under what conditions, and with what assumptions, the observable NH3 abundances can diagnose an atmosphere’s bulk nitrogen abundance. In the first paper of this series, we investigate atmospheric T–P profiles across equilibrium temperature, surface gravity, intrinsic temperature, atmospheric metallicity, and C/O ratio using a 1D radiative–convective equilibrium model. Models with the same intrinsic temperature and surface gravity coincide with a shared “universal” adiabat in the deep atmosphere, across a wide equilibrium temperature range (250–1200 K), which is not seen in hotter or cooler models. We explain this behavior in terms of the classic “radiative zero solution” and then establish a semianalytical T–P profile of the deep atmospheres of warm exoplanets. This profile is then used to predict vertically quenched NH3 abundances. At solar metallicity, our results show that the quenched NH3 abundance only coincides with the bulk nitrogen abundance (within 10%) at low intrinsic temperature, corresponding to a planet with a sub-Jupiter mass (≲1 M J) and old age (≳1 Gyr). If a planet has a high-metallicity (≳10× solar) atmosphere, the quenched NH3 abundance significantly underestimates the bulk nitrogen abundance at almost all planetary masses and ages. We suggest modeling and observational strategies to improve the assessment of bulk nitrogen from NH3.