Realistic modeling of water transport to terrestrial planets by combining long-term dynamics and collision physics
- Author(s)
- Christoph Burger, Christoph Schäfer, Akos Bazso
- Abstract
The last stage of terrestrial planet formation probably comprises the growth of planetary embryos - along with remaining smaller bodies - into the final planets, marked by chaotic interactions between the relatively few remaining large bodies, including similar-sized (giant) collisions and radial mixing of material that originated at very different locations in the disk. Despite the increasing trend of treating individual collisions beyond the (over-)simplified perfect merging assumption, this has not yet been applied consistently to (N-body) simulations of water transport to terrestrial planets, and none of the collision-outcome models that emerged in recent years seems to be well-suited for this task. To close this gap between current planet formation models and the actual fate of volatile material in collisions, we present a framework to consistently combine the dynamics of late-stage planet formation with transfer and loss of material in collisions. Our results show that overall water losses in single collisions can often be tens of percent, and in the common hit-and-run encounters the smaller body is frequently stripped of the majority of its pre-collision volatiles. This strongly suggests the necessity to track both large survivors of a hit-and-run collision (and their retained and transferred volatiles) through the further N-body evolution.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Astrophysics
- Publication date
- 09-2018
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 103003 Astronomy, 103004 Astrophysics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/9bad7221-3533-4ddd-8556-4c683c619c3d