Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userThe Destruction of an Oort Cloud in a rich stellar cluster
382
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
It is possible that the formation of the Oort Cloud dates back to the earliest epochs of solar system history. At that time, the Sun was almost certainly a member of the stellar cluster, where it was born. Since the solar birth cluster is likely to have been massive (1000--10 000 Msol), and therefore long-lived, an issue concerns the survival of such a primordial Oort Cloud. We have investigated this issue by simulating the orbital evolution of Oort Cloud comets for several hundred Myr, assuming the Sun to start its life as a typical member of such a massive cluster. We have devised a synthetic representation of the relevant dynamics, where the cluster potential is represented by a King model, and about 20 close encounters with individual cluster stars are selected and integrated based on the solar orbit and the cluster structure. Thousands of individual simulations are made, each including 3 000 comets with orbits with three different initial semi-major axes. Practically the entire initial Oort Cloud is found to be lost for our choice of semi-major axes (5 000--20 000 au), independent of the cluster mass, although the chance of survival is better for the smaller cluster, since in a certain fraction of the simulations the Sun orbits at relatively safe distances from the dense cluster centre. For the range of birth cluster sizes that we investigate, a primordial Oort Cloud will likely survive only as a small inner core with semi-major axes < 3 000 au. Such a population of comets would be inert to orbital diffusion into an outer halo and subsequent injection into observable orbits. Some mechanism is therefore needed to accomplish this transfer, in case the Oort Cloud is primordial and the birth cluster did not have a low mass. From this point of view, our results lend some support to a delayed formation of the Oort Cloud, that occurred after the Sun had left its birth cluster.
rate research
Read More
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.
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.
The Oort cloud (OC) probably formed more than 4$,$Gyr ago and has been moving with the Sun in the Galaxy since, exposed to external influences, most prominently to the Galactic tide and passing field stars. Theories suggest that other stars might posses exocomets distributed similarly to our OC. We study the erosion of the OC and the possibility for capturing exocomets during the encounters with such field stars. We carry out simulations of flybys, where both stars are surrounded by a cloud of comets. We measure how many exocomets are transferred to the OC, how many OCs comets are lost, and how this depends on the other stars mass, velocity and impact parameter. Exocomets are transferred to the OC only during relatively slow ($lesssim0.5,$km$,$s$^{-1}$) and close ($lesssim10^5,$AU) flybys and these are expected to be extremely rare. Assuming that all passing stars are surrounded by a cloud of exocomets, we derive that the fraction of exocomets in the OC has been about $10^{-5}$--$10^{-4}$. Finally we simulate the OC for the whole lifetime of the Sun, taking into account the encounters and the tidal effects. The OC has lost 25--65% of its mass, mainly due to stellar encounters, and at most 10% (and usually much less) of its mass can be captured. However, exocomets are often lost shortly after the encounter that delivers them, due to the Galactic tide and consecutive encounters.
Comets in the Oort cloud evolve under the influence of internal and external perturbations, such as giant planets, stellar passages, and the galactic tidal field. We aim to study the dynamical evolution of the comets in the Oort cloud, accounting for external perturbations (passing stars and the galactic tide). We first construct an analytical model of stellar encounters. We find that individual perturbations do not modify the dynamics of the comets in the cloud unless very close (< 0.5pc) encounters occur. Using proper motions, parallaxes, and radial velocities from Gaia DR2, we construct an astrometric catalogue of 14,659 stars that are within 50pc from the Sun. For all these stars we calculate the time and the closest distance to the Sun. We find that the cumulative effect of relatively distant ($leq1$ pc) passing stars can perturb the comets in the Oort cloud. Finally, we study the dynamical evolution of the comets in the Oort cloud under the influence of multiple stellar encounters within 2.5pc from the Sun and the galactic tidal field over $pm10$Myr. We considered two models for the Oort cloud, compact (a $leq$0.25 pc) and extended (a$ leq0.5$ pc). We find that the cumulative effect of stellar encounters is the major perturber of the Oort cloud for a compact configuration while for the extended, the galactic tide is the major perturber. In both cases, the effect of passing stars and the galactic tide raises the semi-major axis of $sim1.1$% of the comets at the edge of the cloud up to interstellar regions ($a >0.5$pc). This leads to the creation of transitional interstellar comets, which might become interstellar objects due to external perturbations. This raises the question about the existence of a cloud of objects in the interstellar space which might overlap with our Oort cloud if we consider that other planetary systems face similar processes for the ejection of comets.
Recently the ROSINA mass spectrometer suite on board the European Space Agencys Rosetta spacecraft discovered an abundant amount of molecular oxygen, O2, in the coma of Jupiter family comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko of O2/H2O = 3.80+/-0.85%. It could be shown that O2 is indeed a parent species and that the derived abundances point to a primordial origin. One crucial question is whether the O2 abundance is peculiar to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko or Jupiter family comets in general or whether also Oort cloud comets such as comet 1P/Halley contain similar amounts of molecular oxygen. We investigated mass spectra obtained by the Neutral Mass Spectrometer instrument obtained during the flyby by the European Space Agencys Giotto probe at comet 1P/Halley. Our investigation indicates that a production rate of O2 of 3.7+/-1.7% with respect to water is indeed compatible with the obtained Halley data and therefore that O2 might be a rather common and abundant parent species.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
