Speaker
Description
Connecting planetary atmospheric compositions to their formation environment has become a central challenge in exoplanet science. This link is shaped by the coupled chemical and dynamical evolution of protoplanetary discs, which determine the chemical makeup of the gas and solids accreted by growing planets. I present a new time-dependent framework that combines the long-term physical and chemical evolution of discs with models of giant-planet growth and migration. The disc model includes viscous gas transport, turbulent mixing, radial dust drift, and volatile chemistry across a range of chemical scenarios. We find that even sub-micron grains can drive significant chemical evolution in chemically reprocessed discs, and that the drift and sublimation of ~100 µm icy grains can strongly enrich regions inside snowlines, enhancing key volatiles by up to an order of magnitude. Early planetesimal formation and refractory carbon erosion further imprint distinctive elemental signatures on the disc gas. Coupling these evolving discs to models of giant-planet accretion reveals multi-element trends that link the composition of planetary envelopes to both formation pathways and natal disc chemistry. These trends establish a new metric for interpreting atmospheric measurements and are directly applicable to current and forthcoming surveys - including Ariel’s - offering a route to constraining the natal chemical environments and evolutionary histories of giant planets.