Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21822401d&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #224.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Tens of thousands of small bodies comprise the Kuiper Belt, the remnant planetesimals beyond Neptune. Their orbits are thought to have been sculpted during a period of upheaval in the early Solar System, when the giant planets underwent scattering and/or migration. Therefore they are a rich collection of artifacts for Solar System archaeology. In the "classical” region from 40-50 AU, a population of "hot” objects with inclinations up to 30° overlies a flat "cold” population, with distinct physical properties (i.e. size, color, binary fraction); a third population is in orbital resonance with Neptune. Migration of Neptune, the standard explanation for capturing objects into resonance, preserves cold objects formed in situ but does not produce a hot population. Alternatively, Neptune may have undergone a period of high eccentricity during which it scattered hot objects from the inner disk into the classical region, but this scenario does not produce or preserve a cold population. To investigate which histories produce both hot and cold objects, we fully explore the parameter space of Neptune's initial semi-major axis (a) and eccentricity (e) as well as migration, eccentricity damping, and precession timescales. We determine which dynamical processes affect the orbital evolution of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) and model them analytically. We find that to produce an eccentricity distribution of KBOs consistent with major qualitative observed features, Neptune must be scattered to one of two particular regions of parameter space, both located within e > 0.15 and 25 < a < 29 AU, and then migrate to its current location at 30 AU. Its eccentricity must either damp on a timescale < 0.3 Myr or precess* on a timescale < 0.5 Myr. Thus scattering and migration both play roles in the dynamical history of the Solar System.
Funded by the NSF GRFP.
* Batygin 2011 (in prep)
Dawson Rebekah Ilene
Murray-Clay Ruth
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