Collisional Time Scales in the Kuiper Disk and Their Implications

Details Collisional Time Scales in the Kuiper Disk and Their Implications Collisional Time Scales in the Kuiper Disk and Their Implications

Aug 1995

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1995aj....110..856s&link_type=abstract

Astronomical Journal v.110, p.856

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

103

Solar System: General, Comets: General

Scientific paper

We explore the rate of collisions among bodies in the present-day Kuiper Disk as a function the total mass and population size structure of the disk. We find that collisional evolution is an important evolutionary process in the disk as a whole, and indeed, that it is likely the dominant evolutionary process beyond ≍42 AU, where dynamical instability time scales exceed the age of the solar system. Two key findings we report from this modeling work are: (i) That unless the disk's population structure is sharply truncated for radii smaller than ˜1-2 km, collisions between comets and smaller debris are occurring so frequently in the disk, and with high enough velocities, that the small body (i.e., KM-class object) population in the disk has probably developed into a collisional cascade, thereby implying that the Kuiper Disk comets may not all be primordial, and (ii) that the rate of collisions of smaller bodies with larger 100

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