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Register a new userThe Influence of Outer Solar System Architecture on the Structure and Evolution of the Oort Cloud
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We study the influence of outer Solar System architecture on the structural evolution of the Oort Cloud (OC) and the flux of Earth-crossing comets. In particular, we seek to quantify the role of the giant planets as planetary protectors. To do so, we have run simulations in each of four different planetary mass configurations to understand the significance of each of the giant planets. Because the outer planets modify the structure of the OC throughout its formation, we integrate each simulation over the full age of the Solar System. Over this time, we follow the evolution of cometary orbits from their starting point in the protoplanetary disk to their injection into the OC to their possible re-entry into the inner planetary region. We find that the overall structure of the OC, including the location of boundaries and the relative number of comets in the inner and outer parts, does not change significantly between configurations; however, as planetary mass decreases, the trapping efficiency (TE) of comets into the OC and the flux of comets into the observable region increases. We determine that those comets that evolve onto Earth-crossing orbits come primarily from the inner OC but show no preference for initial protoplanetary disk location. We also find that systems that have at least a Saturn-mass object are effective at deflecting possible Earth-crossing comets but the difference in flux between systems with and without such a planet is less than an order of magnitude. We conclude by discussing the individual roles of the planets and the implications of incorporating more realistic planetary accretion and migration scenarios into simulations, particularly on existing discrepancies between low TE and the mass of the protoplanetary disk and on determining the structural boundaries of the OC.
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We present a chronology of the formation and early evolution of the Oort cloud by simulations. These simulations start with the Solar System being born with planets and asteroids in a stellar cluster orbiting the Galactic center. Upon ejection from its birth environment, we continue to follow the evolution of the Solar System while it navigates the Galaxy as an isolated planetary system. We conclude that the range in semi-major axis between 100au and several 10$^3$,au still bears the signatures of the Sun being born in a 1000MSun/pc$^3$ star cluster, and that most of the outer Oort cloud formed after the Solar System was ejected. The ejection of the Solar System, we argue, happened between 20Myr and 50Myr after its birth. Trailing and leading trails of asteroids and comets along the Suns orbit in the Galactic potential are the by-product of the formation of the Oort cloud. These arms are composed of material that became unbound from the Solar System when the Oort cloud formed. Today, the bulk of the material in the Oort cloud ($sim 70$%) originates from the region in the circumstellar disk that was located between $sim 15$,au and $sim 35$,au, near the current location of the ice giants and the Centaur family of asteroids. According to our simulations, this population is eradicated if the ice-giant planets are born in orbital resonance. Planet migration or chaotic orbital reorganization occurring while the Solar System is still a cluster member is, according to our model, inconsistent with the presence of the Oort cloud. About half the inner Oort cloud, between 100 and $10^4$,au, and a quarter of the material in the outer Oort cloud, $apgt 10^4$,au, could be non-native to the Solar System but was captured from free-floating debris in the cluster or from the circumstellar disk of other stars in the birth cluster.
If the Solar system had a history of planet migration, the signature of that migration may be imprinted on the populations of asteroids and comets that were scattered in the planets wake. Here, we consider the dynamical and collisional evolution of inner Solar system asteroids which join the Oort cloud. We compare the Oort cloud asteroid populations produced by migration scenarios based on the `Nice and `Grand Tack scenarios, as well as a null hypothesis where the planets have not migrated, to the detection of one such object, C/2014 S3 (PANSTARRS). Our simulations find that the discovery of C/2014 S3 (PANSTARRS) only has a greater than one percent chance of occurring if the Oort cloud asteroids evolved on to Oort cloud orbits when the Solar system was not more than about one million years old, as this early transfer to the Oort cloud is necessary to keep the amount of collisional evolution low. We argue this only occurs when a giant (greater than thirty Earth masses) planet orbits at 1 ~ 2 au, and thus our results strongly favour a `Grand Tack-like migration having occurred early in the Solar systems history.
In this paper, we present a study about the dynamical effects of the Galaxy on the external region of the Oort Cloud. The aims of this paper are: i) to determine an outer limit for the Oort Cloud; and ii) to analyse the dynamical behaviour of the most external objects of the Cloud and how they are ejected from the Solar System. This is undertaken by following the temporal evolution of massless test particles in the Galactic environment of the solar neighbourhood. Here we show that the effect of the perturbations from the Galactic tide in the particles is similar to that find for the evolution of wide binary stars population. Moreover, in the Oort Cloud we found a dynamical structure around 10 5 au conformed by objects unbound of the Sun. This structure allows us to define a transition region of stability and an outer boundary for the Oort Cloud, and it is also in agreement with previous results about the disruption of wide binary stars.
We have analyzed the first 3.75 years of data from TAOS, the Taiwanese American Occultation Survey. TAOS monitors bright stars to search for occultations by Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). This dataset comprises 5e5 star-hours of multi-telescope photometric data taken at 4 or 5 Hz. No events consistent with KBO occultations were found in this dataset. We compute the number of events expected for the Kuiper Belt formation and evolution models of Pan & Sari (2005), Kenyon & Bromley (2004), Benavidez & Campo Bagatin (2009), and Fraser (2009). A comparison with the upper limits we derive from our data constrains the parameter space of these models. This is the first detailed comparison of models of the KBO size distribution with data from an occultation survey. Our results suggest that the KBO population is comprised of objects with low internal strength and that planetary migration played a role in the shaping of the size distribution.
Context: Distant trans-Neptunian objects are subject to planetary perturbations and galactic tides. The former decrease with the distance, while the latter increase. In the intermediate regime where they have the same order of magnitude (the inert Oort cloud), both are weak, resulting in very long evolution timescales. To date, three observed objects can be considered to belong to this category. Aims: We aim to provide a clear understanding of where this transition occurs, and to characterise the long-term dynamics of small bodies in the intermediate regime: relevant resonances, chaotic zones (if any), and timescales at play. Results: There exists a tilted equilibrium plane (Laplace plane) about which orbits precess. The dynamics is integrable in the low and high semi-major axis regimes, but mostly chaotic in between. From 800 to 1100 au, the chaos covers almost all the eccentricity range. The diffusion timescales are large, but not to the point of being indiscernible in a 4.5 Gyrs duration: the perihelion distance can actually vary from tens to hundreds of au. Orbital variations are favoured in specific ranges of inclination corresponding to well-defined resonances. Starting from uniform distributions, the orbital angles cluster after 4.5 Gyrs for semi-major axes larger than 500 au, because of a very slow differential precession. Conclusions: Even if it is characterised by very long timescales, the inert Oort cloud is much less inert than it appears. Orbits can be considered inert over 4.5 Gyrs only in small portions of the space of orbital elements, which include (90377) Sedna and 2012VP113. Effects of the galactic tides are discernible down to semi-major axes of about 500 au. We advocate including the galactic tides in simulations of distant trans-Neptunian objects, especially when studying the formation of detached bodies or the clustering of orbital elements.
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