Collisional water transport and water-loss relevant to formation of habitable planets
- Author(s)
- Thomas Maindl, Christoph Schäfer, Nader Haghighipour, Christoph Burger, Rudolf Dvorak
- Abstract
It is widely accepted that the vast majority of Earth's water was delivered to its accretion zone by water-carrying planetesimals and planetary embryos from the outer regions of the asteroid belt while Earth was still forming. While modern simulations of terrestrial planet formation show this process with high resolution, their treatment of the actual delivery of water is still rudimentary assuming that a water-carrying object will maintain all its water content during its journey from its original orbit to the accretion zone of Earth. Models of the ice longevity have, however, shown that the water-ice may not stay intact, and asteroids and planetary embryos may lose some of their original water in form of ice sublimation during their dynamical evolution. Also, collisions among these bodies while on their journey to Earth's accretion zone will result in the loss of large amounts of their water. These effects could be especially important during the formation of terrestrial planets as this process takes tens to hundreds of millions of years.
In this study, we present results on collisional water loss obtained from collision simulations involving differently sized planetary embryos. We find that in most cases of realistic collision velocities and impact angles water loss is not negligible and may change the water inventory of formed terrestrial planets considerably. Finally, we get indication that it is not sufficient to specify collisional water loss just by the collision velocity in terms of the mutual escape velocity and the impact angle. Rather, factors like mass ratio, absolute masses (Burger & Schäfer, 2017, this volume), and the objects' water distribution need to be considered.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Astrophysics
- External organisation(s)
- Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, University of Hawaii
- Pages
- 137 - 153
- Publication date
- 03-2017
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 103003 Astronomy, 103004 Astrophysics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/6fb64833-6776-4d69-8af4-fbbe4560e104