A platform to estimate physical properties and thermal evolution pathways of exoplanet interiors

Over 4,000 extrasolar planets have been confirmed, opening the question as to their likelihood of hosting life. An exoplanet's habitability is controlled by its surface environment, whose evolution is shaped by the chemical and thermal evolution of its interior. Various tools exist for inferring exoplanetary bulk structure and composition from sparse, uncertain observational data (mass, radius, and stellar chemistry). A natural next question is how to link these static snapshots to possible thermal evolution pathways. Does the mineralogical and structural variety we expect for rocky planet mantles produce a comparable variety in cooling behaviors?

Here, we develop a computational platform that combines available tools from the exoplanet science community with published thermodynamic and mineral-physics datasets. The platform estimates exoplanetary bulk structure from a user-provided mass and radius, and calculates the thermodynamic and physical properties of a given mantle assemblage as a function of temperature. These properties are then fed into a parameterized convection model, which self-consistently calculates the evolution of mantle potential temperature and mantle thermal-physical properties over time. The platform is optimized to import exoplanetary structures and compositions from ExoPlex output files. With this platform, we study the statistical distribution of exoplanetary thermal evolution pathways. The platform is developed in Python, available on GitHub ( https://git.io/fjSC8 ), and designed for extensibility and ease-of-use. An interactive Jupyter Notebook version may be run in a web browser via https://bit.ly/2Yg2p0H .