College of Science & Engineering
Twin Cities
These researchers use MSI's high performance computing resources to calculate chemical equilibrium in rock planets and exoplanets in the system O-Si-Mg-Fe-Na-H-C-S-N, including phase equilibria and mass balance for the silicate, metal, and gaseous portions of the planet. The goal is to understand how the atmospheres of hot early planets are governed by variables such as planetary mass, the mass of nebular hydrogen gravitationally attracted to that solid mass, and the distribution of other chemical species provided to the planet during its accretion. The calculated atmospheres (compositions, pressures, temperatures) can ultimately be used to better understand the evolution of planets in our own solar system (Earth, Venus, Mars) and can be compared to the atmospheres of exoplanets observed with space telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
At present the researchers are using a code (Schlichting and Young, 2022) capable of performing these calculations up to extreme conditions (100s of Gigapascals, 7000 K). The code was written in Python and running in a Linux environment. On a modern laptop, the code takes approximately 3 hours for a single state point calculation (one temperature, one pressure, one bulk chemical composition, one planetary mass), but the researchers need to perform calculations as a function of these state variables, necessitating the use of the supercomputers.