Other
Scientific paper
Jan 1997
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997icar..125...50d&link_type=abstract
Icarus, Volume 125, Issue 1, pp. 50-60.
Other
119
Scientific paper
The Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt contains a population of objects ~10^3 times that of the main asteroid belt, spread over a volume ~10^3 larger and with relative speeds ~10 times lower. As for the asteroids, the size distribution of Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt objects has been modified by mutual impacts over Solar System history. We have modeled this collisional evolution process using a numerical code developed originally to study asteroid collisional evolution but modified to reflect collision rates in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt. Our numerical simulations show that collisional evolution is substantial in the inner part of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, but its intensity decreases with increasing distance from the Sun. In the inner belt, objects with diameters D > 50-100 km are not depleted by disruptive collisions; hence they reflect the original (formative) population (many of them, however, may have been converted into ``rubble piles''). On the other hand, smaller objects are mostly multigenerational fragments, although the original population must have contained a significant number of bodies down to at least a few tens of kilometers in size in order to initiate a collisional cascade. About 10 fragments, 1-10 km in size, are produced per year in the inner Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, with a few percent of them inserted into chaotic resonant orbits. This is in rough agreement with the required influx rate of Jupiter-family comets. Both collisions and dynamical instabilities associated with resonances are processes that can inject comets into the ``escape hatches,'' but our results indicate that most comets coming from the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt would be fragments from larger parent bodies, rather than primitive planetesimals. However, this does not apply to Chiron-sized (D > 100 km) objects, which must be primordial and delivered to the outer Solar System by either dynamical processes or nondisruptive collisions.
Davis Donald R.
Farinella Paolo
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