Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2001
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001aas...199.2802r&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 199th AAS Meeting, #28.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 33, p.1351
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
In my Ph.D. dissertation, I explored the plausibility of having five terrestrial planets for 8 -- 200 Myr, having two of them collide in this time, and leaving a planetary system with small orbital eccentricities as in the Solar System. I performed 191 N-body simulations which started with the planets Mercury through Neptune with their current orbits and masses except that the Earth and Moon were replaced with two bodies (the Earth-Moon progenitors), each in its own heliocentric orbit between the orbits of Venus and Mars, such that mass and angular momentum were conserved. I varied the mass ratio of the Earth-Moon progenitors, their initial eccentricities, inclinations, and semi-major axes. When a collision occurred, the bodies were simply merged into one. Slightly over one-half of the simulations ended with a collision between two planets before 200 Myr had elapsed, and about one-third of the systems which started with five terrestrial planets were stable for 200 Myr. Out of the 191 simulations, 16 ended with a collision between the Earth-Moon progenitors in the right time interval; four of these 16 resulting systems resembled the Solar System in that the terrestrial planets were on nearly circular, coplanar orbits. An additional 27 simulations ended with a collision at the right time which left four terrestrial planets with a mass distribution similar to that in the Solar System. Four of these 27 resulting systems resembled the Solar System. Thus, the scenario I explored does seem plausible. This research was supported in part by NASA's Origins of Solar Systems program under grant NAG 5-9680.
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