Chaotic Capture of Planetesimals into Regular Regions of the Solar System. II: Embedding Comets in the Asteroid Belt

Details Chaotic Capture of Planetesimals into Regular Regions of the Solar System. II: Embedding Comets in the Asteroid Belt Chaotic Capture of Planetesimals into Regular Regions of the Solar System. II: Embedding Comets in the Asteroid Belt

May 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dda....39.1205l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #39, #12.05

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The main asteroid belt, which inhabits a relatively narrow annulus 2.1-3.3 AU from the Sun, contains a surprising diversity of objects ranging from primitive ice/rock mixtures to igneous rocks. The standard model used to explain this assumes that most asteroids formed in situ from a primordial disk that experienced radical chemical changes within this zone. Here we continue our study of chaotic capture in the solar system (see abstract by Morbidelli et al. in this volume) and show that at least some of this variation was produced by dynamical processes, namely the capture of numerous comets in the outer belt during a violent period of planetary orbital evolution. These results fundamentally change our view of the asteroid belt because they imply that the observed diversity says as much about the dynamical processes of planet formation as it does about the intrinsic variation of the proto-planetary disk. The captured comets, composed of physically weak, organic-rich primitive materials, would have been more susceptible to collisional evolution than typical main belt asteroids. Accordingly, while our numerical results indicate comets once dominated the outer main belt, they have since been reduced by collisions over billions of years to a few tens of percent of the present-day population. Their weak nature makes them a prodigious source of micrometeorites - sufficient to explain why most are primitive in composition and are isotopically different from most macroscopic meteorites.

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