Solar radiation and collisional balance of the meteoritic complex
Abstract
Besides the gravitational forces due to the Sun and other planets, the orbital evolution of interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) is driven by non-gravitational effects (the solar wind, Poynting-Robertson effect). This study presents some new results based on the action of the solar wind and a better comparison of the lifetimes due to the solar radiation action and the collisions.
In the conventional approach (Gruen et al. 1985), the main loss mechanism for particles 10^{-10} g ≤ m ≤ 10^{-5} g is the Poynting-Robertson effect. However, our results show that the effect of the solar wind is more important than the Poynting- Robertson effect, with the real upper limit more than 2 × 10^{-4} g and the corresponding particle radius of 275 microns instead of 100 microns (Grun et al. 1985). A more elaborate model that compares the drift and collisional lifetimes leads to the conclusion that a particle of the mass 22 × 10^{-5} g is destroyed by a collision before reaching the heliocentric distances r = 0.5 au (assuming the starting position r_{0} = 1 au). Moreover, particles of sizes greater than 550 micrometers are destructed before reaching r = 0.5 au, while smaller particles can move to lower heliocentric distances. Furthermore, the total solar radiation loss rate inside 1 au is (0.6-1.0) tons/sec instead of the conventional value 0.26 tons/sec (Gruen et al. 1985). Consequently, it is important to reevaluate the size distribution of interplanetary meteoroids on the basis of the known real action of the solar wind.- Publication:
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Asteroids, Comets, Meteors 2014
- Pub Date:
- July 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014acm..conf..273K