Jeans Instability Criteria and the Formation of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fragments

Details Jeans Instability Criteria and the Formation of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fragments Jeans Instability Criteria and the Formation of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fragments

May 1995

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1995aas...186.3304h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, 186th AAS Meeting, #33.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 27, p.858

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Scientific paper

Recent N--body simulations of a tidally disrupted comet indicate that gravitational instabilities may be responsible for the appearance of comet Shoemaker--Levy 9 (S--L 9). These models are physically distinct from other models which assume tides broke the comet into the observed twenty or so separate fragments. The N body simulations show that if a comet catastrophically fragments into N>>20 parts, the particles can gravitationally recondense into n fragments a few hours after periapse. Since n depends sensitively on the parent comet's density, catastrophic disruption of a comet provides a sensitive measure of its density. We show, via a tidal impulse model, that if a tide disrupts a comet into a cloud of many particles, the resulting cloud is Jeans unstable and condenses to 20 fragments about 10 hours after periapse for a comet density 0.6 gm/cm. Whether these instabilities condense to compact objects or remain as extended swarms depends upon the rate at which collisions might damp their random motions. We also show that a varicose instability in an incompressible medium cannot account for S-L 9's twenty fragments, for this instability quickly breaks-up a tidally elongated cylinder into only n 1 or 2 fragments. These results indicate that a particle gas equation of state can be representative of catastrophically disrupted comets.

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