Other
Scientific paper
May 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dda....41.0207j&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #41, #2.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.926
Other
Scientific paper
Binary asteroid systems comprise 16% of the Near-Earth asteroid (NEA) population. A proposed mechanism for creating these systems is rotational fission, observational evidence for which is being reported at this meeting (Scheeres, Pravec, et al.). We have developed a detailed simulation of this process to mimic the evolution of rubble pile asteroids spun to fission by YORP. We model the proto-binary using tri-axial ellipsoid components to capture spin-orbit coupling, apply instantaneous tidal torques to both members to model energy dissipation, and incorporate solar perturbations. After fission these binaries are located deep in their Hill sphere and their non-spherical shapes strongly couple the spin and orbital states of the bodies, transferring angular momentum and energy across the system. These systems evolve chaotically and quickly, and often reach high apoapsis radii where solar perturbations can play an important role.
We find distinct evolution of the systems as a function of the mass ratio of the fissioned asteroid. For mass ratios greater than 0.2 systems cannot escape and all rapidly evolve into doubly-synchronous binaries, similar to Hermes, whose apparent lack of abundance may be due to observational bias and to rapid evolution due to the BYORP effect. For mass ratios less than 0.2 we find a number of different outcomes. First, the systems are Hill unstable and can escape from each other, forming asteroid pairs. Prior to escape, however, the secondary of a significant fraction is spun to fission, thus creating a temporary ternary system subject to three body dynamics, solar perturbations, spin-orbit coupling, and additional fission events. Resulting from our simulations we find final asteroid states that include a-synchronous binaries, high eccentricity binaries, ternary systems, and asteroid pairs - all of which are also found in the observed asteroid population. The process also predicts the creation of primaries with equatorial bulges.
Jacobson Seth A.
Scheeres Daniel J.
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