Chaotic Capture of Planetesimals into Regular Regions of the Solar System. I: The Kuiper Belt

Statistics – Applications

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Scientific paper

Adiabatic capture of particles in resonances is a subject widely covered in classical celestial mechanics, that has several applications in planetary science. Here we propose a new mechanism of interest for planetary science applications: the chaotic capture.
Chaotic capture occurs when, due to the change of some parameter of the system, a region of phase space becomes temporarily chaotic, before returning to a stable dynamical regime. The particles traveling freely in the chaotic sea, can reside temporarily in the concerned phase space region when the latter is chaotic, building there a steady state population of transient objects. When the region becomes regular, part of this population remains `frozen', that is permanently captured.
We discuss an application of this process for what concerns the origin of the Kuiper Belt in the framework of the `Nice' model of evolution of the giant planets. This model is characterized by a short, but violent, instability phase, during which the planets were on large eccentricity orbits. One characteristic of this model is that the original proto-planetary disk had to be truncated at roughly 30 to 35 AU. As a result, the Kuiper belt would have initially been empty. We show that the Kuiper belt is totally unstable when Neptune's eccentricity is of order of 0.2. Thus, chaotic capture can work, and objects from the region interior to 35 AU can be implanted into the Kuiper belt without excessive inclination excitation. Assuming that the last encounter with Uranus delivered Neptune onto a low-inclination orbit with a semi-major axis of 27 AU and an eccentricity of 0.3, and that subsequently Neptune's eccentricity damped in 1 My, our simulations reproduce the main observed properties of the Kuiper belt at an unprecedented level.

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