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      The Collisional Evolution of the Primordial Kuiper Belt, Its Destabilized Population, and the Trojan Asteroids

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          Abstract

          The tumultuous early era of outer solar system evolution culminated when Neptune migrated across the primordial Kuiper Belt (PKB) and triggered a dynamical instability among the giant planets. This event led to the ejection of ∼99.9% of the PKB (here called the destabilized population), heavy bombardment of the giant planet satellites, and the capture of Jupiter’s Trojans. While this scenario has been widely tested using dynamical models, there have been fewer investigations into how the PKB, its destabilized population, and the Trojans experienced collisional evolution. Here we examined this issue for all three populations with the code Boulder. Our constraints included the size–frequency distributions (SFDs) of the Trojan asteroids and craters on the giant planet satellites. Using this combination, we solved for the unknown disruption law affecting bodies in these populations. The weakest ones, from an impact energy per mass perspective, were diameter D ∼ 20 m. Overall, collisional evolution produces a power-law-like shape for multikilometer Trojans and a wavy-shaped SFD in the PKB and destabilized populations. The latter can explain (i) the shapes of the ancient and younger crater SFDs observed on the giant planet satellites, (ii) the shapes of the Jupiter family and long-period comet SFDs, which experienced different degrees of collision evolution, and (iii) the present-day impact frequency of superbolides on Jupiter and smaller projectiles on Saturn’s rings. Our model results also indicate that many observed comets, the majority which are D < 10 km, are likely to be gravitational aggregates formed by large-scale collision events.

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          Origin of the orbital architecture of the giant planets of the Solar System.

          Planetary formation theories suggest that the giant planets formed on circular and coplanar orbits. The eccentricities of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, however, reach values of 6 per cent, 9 per cent and 8 per cent, respectively. In addition, the inclinations of the orbital planes of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune take maximum values of approximately 2 degrees with respect to the mean orbital plane of Jupiter. Existing models for the excitation of the eccentricity of extrasolar giant planets have not been successfully applied to the Solar System. Here we show that a planetary system with initial quasi-circular, coplanar orbits would have evolved to the current orbital configuration, provided that Jupiter and Saturn crossed their 1:2 orbital resonance. We show that this resonance crossing could have occurred as the giant planets migrated owing to their interaction with a disk of planetesimals. Our model reproduces all the important characteristics of the giant planets' orbits, namely their final semimajor axes, eccentricities and mutual inclinations.
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            Collisional model of asteroids and their debris

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              Debiased Orbital and Absolute Magnitude Distribution of the Near-Earth Objects

              W Bottke (2002)
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                Author and article information

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                Journal
                The Planetary Science Journal
                Planet. Sci. J.
                American Astronomical Society
                2632-3338
                September 20 2023
                September 01 2023
                September 20 2023
                September 01 2023
                : 4
                : 9
                : 168
                Article
                10.3847/PSJ/ace7cd
                17f907d6-bfdf-445f-8935-6550049eee4e
                © 2023

                http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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