Accretion of the outer planets and its influence on the surface impact process of the terrestrial planets

Details Accretion of the outer planets and its influence on the surface impact process of the terrestrial planets Accretion of the outer planets and its influence on the surface impact process of the terrestrial planets

Jan 1997

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997abos.conf..235f&link_type=abstract

Conference Paper, Astronomical and Biochemical Origins and the Search for Life in the Universe, IAU Colloquium 161, Publisher: B

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Terrestrial Planets, Planetary Surfaces, Hypervelocity Impact, Protoplanets, Planetary Mass, Neptune (Planet), Ice, Uranus (Planet), Volatility

Scientific paper

We study numerically the scattering of residual icy planetesimals towards the terrestrial planets zone during the accumulation of proto-Uranus and proto-Neptune. Our results show that an amount of icy material of several Earth masses could have reached the terrestrial planet zone on a time scale of a few 10 exp 8 yr. An already-formed Earth would have received an amount of about 3 x 10 exp 22 kg of volatiles (this is about 20 times the amount of water contained in the oceans). Mars would have experienced a similar large volatile injection of about 5 x 10 exp 21 kg. Yet, it is possible that part of the material injected by the accreting outer planets arrived in the inner planetary region before the terrestrial planets finished sweeping all the massive planetoids of their influence zones. If this was the case, the accreted volatile material would have subsequently been lost in megaimpacts. Moreover, massive icy planetesimals impacting at velocities much greater than the escape velocity might have led to a net erosion of volatile material, rather than accretion. Our numerical results show that the outer planets could have grown to sizes comparable to their current ones in time scales of a few 10 exp 8 yr.

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