When Oort Clouds Collide

Details When Oort Clouds Collide When Oort Clouds Collide

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21933401g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #334.01

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Scientific paper

If other stars have Oort clouds similar to that theorized for the Sun (roughly spherical, with a radius of 100,000 AU), could the clouds interact during a close stellar passage and transfer material? How likely is it that the Sun's Oort cloud contains comets stripped from other stars’ clouds?
We modeled encounters between the Oort clouds of the Sun and passing stars over four billion years. Our simulations showed that over the Sun's lifetime, it would have many encounters resulting in some mass exchange and a handful of encounters resulting in large mass exchange.
At least 5% of the Sun's comet population might be from other stars, and potentially much more. The range of mass gained (or lost) integrated over the ensemble of encounters is quite wide.
Even in encounters that did not result in exchange of comets in the clouds, our simulations showed that they can still pump up the eccentricity of the orbits of some of the comets into highly elliptical orbits. A few comets gain eccentricities close enough to one to bring them into the inner Solar System, consistent with the observed orbits of hyperbolic and very long period comets.
Acknowledgments: CMG was supported by the NAU REU program (funded by NSF, grant number AST-1004107).

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