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Forming Binary Near-Earth Asteroids From Tidal Disruptions

Forming Binary Near-Earth Asteroids From Tidal Disruptions

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which means it should have a critical encounter every 1.75 Myr, despite requiring similartimescales to tidally revolve to its doubly synchronous state. This result for Hermes highlightsthe nature of this calculation, that it is a statistical average, and does not considerresonant encounters, or dynamically stable orbits within the NEA population.A second implementation of the code included inline 3-body integrations to model abinary encounter with a planet within the simulation itself. In this implementation theexact semi-major axis and mass ratio of the binary is used to setup and run a 3-body integrationin pkdgrav of that binary with <strong>Earth</strong> with randomly selected encounter parametersof close approach distance and speed. Again, no eccentricity is given to this initial binary.After the encounter the new semi-major axis and eccentricity of the binary replace thepre-encounter values. If the binary was disrupted the resultant body is treated as a singleasteroid again. This implementation offers a level of sophistication greater than the previouslydescribed runs via the lookup table by providing binary orbital changes induced bythe encounter, rather than just indicating whether or not the binary was disrupted. However,the overall results in this work are not very sensitive to which method of 3-bodyencounters was used, and generally we would only expect inclusion of this to decreasethe binary fraction due to the increases in eccentricity that are tracked.4.1.4 Migrating binary MBAsA large unknown in the study of binary NEAs is the extent of any migration of binaryasteroids from the Main Belt population. If binary asteroids can migrate successfullyfrom MBA orbits into NEA orbits then the numbers and properties of these binaries maybe extremely important in shaping the binary NEA population.In this work binary MBAs were included in the steady-state simulation as a variablepercentage of the incoming asteroids. The binary properties were drawn from a previousstudy of a family-forming collisions modeled with SPH code and pkdgrav (Durda92

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