English

Migration of Small Bodies and Dust to the Terrestrial Planets

Astrophysics 2010-11-29 v1

Abstract

We integrated the orbital evolution of 30,000 Jupiter-family comets, 1300 resonant asteroids, and 7000 asteroidal, trans-Neptunian, and cometary dust particles. For initial orbital elements of bodies close to those of Comets 2P, 10P, 44P, and 113P, a few objects got Earth-crossing orbits with semi-major axes aa<<2 AU and moved in such orbits for more than 1 Myr (up to tens or even hundreds of Myrs). Four objects (from 2P and 10P runs) even got inner-Earth orbits (with aphelion distance QQ<<0.983 AU) and Aten orbits for Myrs. Our results show that the trans-Neptunian belt can provide a significant portion of near-Earth objects, or the number of trans-Neptunian objects migrating inside the solar system can be smaller than it was earlier considered, or most of 1-km former trans-Neptunian objects that had got near-Earth object orbits for millions of years disintegrated into mini-comets and dust during a smaller part of their dynamical lifetimes. The probability of a collision of an asteroidal or cometary particle during its lifetime with the Earth was maximum at diameter dd\sim100 μ\mum. At dd<<10 μ\mum such probability for trans-Neptunian particles was less than that for asteroidal particles by less than an order of magnitude, so the fraction of trans-Neptunian particles with such diameter near Earth can be considerable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0411005,
  title  = {Migration of Small Bodies and Dust to the Terrestrial Planets},
  author = {S. I. Ipatov and J. C. Mather},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0411005},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

Submitted to Proc. of the IAU Colloquium N 197 "Dynamics of populations of planetary systems" (Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro, 31 August - 4 September, 2004)