Under-produced Ethylene In The Atmosphere Of Titan

Details Under-produced Ethylene In The Atmosphere Of Titan Under-produced Ethylene In The Atmosphere Of Titan

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.3613l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #36.13; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1067

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The major molecules in the atmosphere of Titan are nitrogen and methane. The coupled chemistry between nitrogen and carbon leads to high abundances of nitrogen/carbon compounds. This is caused primarily by the low abundance of hydrogen, and hence processes that "recycle” photolytic products of methane back to methane become inefficient. Though the current hydrocarbon/nitrogen kinetics schemes have been accepted for years, there remain major uncertainties. Even ethylene, one of simplest hydrocarbons, the abundance in the stratosphere of Titan is under-estimated by most updated photochemical models, by as much as an order of magnitude. A recent laboratory measurement carried out by Adamkovics and Boering (2003) provides an important constraint to test the hydrocarbon kinetics. One most important constraint is that the time-dependency of the abundances of hydrocarbons is observed. To fully test the sensitivity of chemical reactions to the abundances of the produced products and also to resolve the issue of under-predicted ethylene, an adjoint model is developed in complementary to the existing forward Caltech/JPL KINETICS model. We find that the abundances of C2H2, C2H4, C2H6, and C4H10 can now be well reproduced while that of C4H2 is underestimated by 1-2 orders of magnitude. The abundance of C3H4 is underestimated with Moses et al.’ (2000) kinetics but overestimated with Moses et al.’ (2005) kinetics. This suggests a major gap in our understanding of chemical pathways to higher hydrocarbons.

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