Resolving core-envelope degeneracies in giant planets and sub-Neptunes: constraining the equivalence in the presence of dilute gradients

The widespread recognition of dilute, "fuzzy" cores in giant planets and massive volatile mantles in sub-Neptunes has made interior modelling a highly degenerate, multi-dimensional problem. To map these degeneracies, we present fuzzycore, an open-source static structural integrator with a unified layered architecture spanning rock-water-envelope sub-Neptunes through volatile-rich gas giants. The framework supports dense parameter sweeps over compositional gradients at fixed observed $(M_p, R_p, Z_{atm})$, enabling consistent forward-model exploration across the radius valley and the warm-giant population. It solves hydrostatic equilibrium across phase-separated iron, rock, and water layers beneath a gaseous envelope, using a highly resolved adaptive grid to model arbitrary heavy-element gradients and parameterising the dilution width to evaluate the structural impact of varying core-envelope boundaries. We benchmark fuzzycore against an evolution-derived Jupiter profile, demonstrating that when envelope boundary metallicities and integrated heavy-element budgets are matched, the macroscopic radius is robust to the exact functional topology of the gradient to within 2.3%, allowing smooth parameterisations to densely map interior degeneracies. Applying this to the sub-Neptune regime, we generate a water-world degeneracy atlas, quantifying how the required envelope metallicity and dilution width trade off against assumed water-mass fractions to reproduce a fixed planetary radius. By decoupling structural profiling from time-dependent energy transport and convective mixing, fuzzycore maps static degeneracies at resolutions that complement, rather than replace, fully evolutionary Henyey treatments, and serves as a forward-model backend for linking atmospheric metallicity priors from JWST and Ariel to deep interior architectures.

Source: arXiv:2607.16713v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16713v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.16713v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16713v1