2006 SQ372: A Planetary Interloper from the Inner Oort Cloud

Details 2006 SQ372: A Planetary Interloper from the Inner Oort Cloud 2006 SQ372: A Planetary Interloper from the Inner Oort Cloud

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.0201k&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #2.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.387

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

With a semimajor axis of 957 AU and a perihelion of 24 AU, 2006 SQ372 resides at the interface between the Scattered Disk and the inner Oort Cloud. We investigate two different scenarios to explain the orbit of 2006 SQ372. The first is that SQ372 originally resided in the Scattered Disk, and its perihelion has diffused inward leading to an increase of its semimajor axis via encounters with Neptune. Alternatively, SQ372 could have been an Oort Cloud body that had its perihelion reinjected into the planetary region by perturbations from passing stars and the galactic tide. Following this, its semimajor axis would be lowered to its current value due to encounters with the giant planets. We model both of these scenarios and determine that an Oort Cloud origin is at least 10 times more likely. Furthermore, we show that only bodies from the unobserved inner Oort Cloud (r < 20,000 AU) are capable of evolving on to orbits similar to SQ372. Thus, SQ372 is most likely the first detected long-period comet from the inner Oort Cloud. The detection of many similar objects in upcoming surveys such as LSST and Pan-STARRS is expected and will provide new information on the structure of the Oort Cloud as well as the dynamical history of the solar system.

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