The Origin of the Spins of Kuiper Belt Objects

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

We have developed a simple model to study the collisional evolution of the spins of Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs). We find that the observed spins of KBOs larger than ~ 200 km cannot be explained by collisions, if the objects had no spin at the end of the primary growth phase. This suggests that large KBOs must have attained their spin rates very early in their evolution. If the accretion process was not entirely isotropic, and contributed angular momentum to the growing KBOs, we find that a ~ 10% asymmetry in the net angular momentum of accreted plan-etesimals would explain the observations. However, if the accreted planetesimals were comparable in size to the growing body, no anisotropy is required because the accretion of individual particles can produce significant spin changes.

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