Reassessing the Classical Kuiper Belt as a Source of the Jupiter Family Comets

Details Reassessing the Classical Kuiper Belt as a Source of the Jupiter Family Comets Reassessing the Classical Kuiper Belt as a Source of the Jupiter Family Comets

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.4701v&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #47.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.481

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The scattered disk, a dynamical subclass of the Kuiper belt, is often argued to be the dominant source of the short period Jupiter family comets (JFCs), but our preliminary results from numerical simulations of the classical Kuiper belt show that it is an equally viable source population. We constructed a model Kuiper belt from a debiased orbital distribution of known Kuiper belt objects; we numerically simulated the orbital evolution of this model (under the influence of the sun and the four outer planets), and we used the rate at which our test particle KBOs had close encounters with Neptune to estimate how efficiently the classical Kuiper belt population contributes to the JFCs. The resulting number of classical belt objects required to supply the presently estimated JFC population falls just within the error bars of extrapolations of its observed cumulative size distribution down to comet-sized objects. Our previous work showed similar results when we considered the scattered disk as the sole source of the JFCs. This suggests that contributions to the JFCs from the classical Kuiper belt and the scattered disk may be comparable, or that either source could dominate, not necessarily the scattered disk.

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