Giant Impacts and the Distribution of Planetary Obliquities

Details Giant Impacts and the Distribution of Planetary Obliquities Giant Impacts and the Distribution of Planetary Obliquities

May 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000dda....31.0606l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA Meeting #31, #06.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 32, p.863

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We have conducted a set of 200 numerical experiments to test the hypothesis that a giant impact leading to the formation of Earth's Moon could have occurred tens of millions of years after most of the small debris in the inner Solar System had been incorporated into terrestrial planets or been removed from the region. More than half of these simulations ended with a giant impact between two of the five terrestrial planets that were initially present. Neglecting any rotational angular momentum prior to the collision, the merged planet typically has a rotation period of less than five hours. The mean planetary obliquity is 91.7 degrees, and the median is 87.9 degrees; thus, there is no statistically significant difference between the number of bodies with prograde rotation and the number with retrograde rotation. There is a paucity of planets with obliquity close to 90 degrees, but the total number of impacts was too small for this result to be of much significance. Several encounters leading to collisions are dominated by 3-body effects, with the velocity at impact being slightly less than the free-space escape velocity of the two bodies; the obliquity distribution produced by these impacts appears to be random. This research was supported in part by NASA's OSSRP under grant NAG 5-4640

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