On the excitation of the primordial small body belts

Details On the excitation of the primordial small body belts On the excitation of the primordial small body belts

Dec 1998

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998dps....30.5521p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #30, #55.P21; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 30, p.1451

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

The existence of the asteroid belt and of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, both dynamically excited and with a total mass that is only a small fraction of the original one, is very intriguing and may provide several clues for understanding the forming phases of our Solar System. The existence and the main properties of the belts of small bodies should be considered as observational constraints to discriminate among ``good'' and ``bad'' scenarios of Solar System's primordial evolution. For example, the median eccentricity of the asteroid belt is about 0.15, while its median inclination is 5.9(deg) . The present total mass is estimated to be of order 5 x 10(-4}M_{oplus ) , namely 10(2) --10(3) times smaller than its primordial mass. The Edgeworth-Kuiper belt seems to have similar characteristics.. We introduce a new method for estimating the excitation of a swarm of small bodies due to gravitational interaction with large planetesimals scattered by a giant planet. We show that a few Neptune-scattered planetesimals of one to two Earth masses could have excited the eccentricities and inclinations of the vast majority of bodies in the primordial Edgeworth-Kuiper belt. This could result in sculpting the belt to its currently observed structure and in depleting most of its primordial mass by: (i) injecting most of the bodies from the stable into the unstable regions in the inner belt; (ii) enhancing the role of mutual catastrophic collisions in the outer belt. The same mechanism involving Jupiter scattered planetesimals of about one Earth mass can excite the outer asteroid belt, hence depleting it of most of its primordial mass by increasing the eccentricities above the critical value 0.05. However this fails to excite the inner belt except in a few rare cases where the planetesimals can be decoupled from Jupiter by mutual gravitational perturbations.

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