Collisional Cascade Caclulations for Irregular Satellite Swarms in Fomalhaut b
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
2015-09-30 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Abstract
We describe an extensive suite of numerical calculations for the collisional evolution of irregular satellite swarms around 1--300 M-earth planets orbiting at 120 AU in the Fomalhaut system. For 10--100 M-earth planets, swarms with initial masses of roughly 1% of the planet mass have cross-sectional areas comparable to the observed cross-sectional area of Fomalhaut b. Among 30--300 M-earth planets, our calculations yield optically thick swarms of satellites for ages of 1-10 Myr. Observations with HST and ground-based AO instruments can constrain the frequency of these systems around stars in the beta Pic moving group and possibly other nearby associations of young stars.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1508.03350,
title = {Collisional Cascade Caclulations for Irregular Satellite Swarms in Fomalhaut b},
author = {Scott J. Kenyon and Benjamin C. Bromley},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.03350},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
46 pages, 30 figures, ApJ, accepted