astrobites | Daily Paper Summaries | 2019 Jul 01
Will Saunders wrote:
Every object in the Kuiper Belt is a survivor. Some survived collisions that nearly smashed them apart and others survived nearby encounters with planets that could have sent them out of the Solar System forever. The luckiest accreted dust from their smashed neighbors or used a nearby passage of Neptune to fling them into a stable orbit. Of the many that survived, most survived alone.
A small number of known Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), however, contain companions that orbit around the mutual center of mass of the binary system. These KBO binaries can vary from equal mass binaries to a pebble orbiting a monolith. Astronomers study KBOs in part because their survival patterns give clues to the conditions in the early Solar System; the same is true about survival of KBO binaries. Today’s authors recently published work on a binary asteroid, (617) Patroclus-Menoetius, that survived unprobable transportation from the outer Solar System to an orbit near Jupiter. ...
The goal of the research presented in this paper is to simulate the history of KBO binaries to determine how each population evolved. As more binaries are discovered, better population statistics can then be used to estimate the conditions in the early Solar System that created them. ...
Binary Survival in the Outer Solar System ~ David Nesvorny, David Vokrouhlicky
- Icarus 331:49 (Oct 2019) DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2019.04.030
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1905.02282 > 06 May 2019