Migration of small bodies and dust to the terrestrial planets
Abstract
We integrated the orbital evolution of 30,000 Jupiter-family comets, 1300 resonant asteroids, and 7000 asteroidal, trans-Neptunian, and cometary dust particles. For initial orbital elements of bodies close to those of Comets 2P, 10P, 44P, and 113P, a few objects got Earth-crossing orbits with semi-major axes a<2 AU and moved in such orbits for more than 1 Myr (up to tens or even hundreds of Myrs). Three objects (from 2P and 10P runs) even got inner-Earth orbits (with aphelion distance Q<0.983 AU) and Aten orbits for Myrs. Our results show that the trans-Neptunian belt can provide a significant portion of near-Earth objects, or the number of trans-Neptunian objects migrating inside the solar system can be smaller than it was earlier considered, or most of 1-km former trans-Neptunian objects that had got near-Earth object orbits for millions of years disintegrated into mini-comets and dust during a smaller part of their dynamical lifetimes. The probability of a collision of an asteroidal or cometary particle during its lifetime with the Earth was maximum at diameter d∼ 100 mum. At d<10 mum such probability for trans-Neptunian particles was less than that for asteroidal particles by less than an order of magnitude, so the fraction of trans-Neptunian particles with such diameter near Earth can be considerable.
- Publication:
-
IAU Colloq. 197: Dynamics of Populations of Planetary Systems
- Pub Date:
- February 2005
- DOI:
- arXiv:
- arXiv:astro-ph/0411005
- Bibcode:
- 2005dpps.conf..399I
- Keywords:
-
- Comets;
- asteroids;
- Kuiper Belt.;
- Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- Submitted to Proc. of the IAU Colloquium N 197 "Dynamics of populations of planetary systems" (Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro, 31 August - 4 September, 2004)