Astrochemistry

Water Delivery To Dry Protoplanets By Hit-and-run Collisions

By Keith Cowing

Press Release

astro-ph.EP

February 3, 2020

Filed under astrochemistry

Water Delivery To Dry Protoplanets By Hit-and-run Collisions — Dry targets being hit by water-rich projectiles (wmf = 0.1), for hit-and-run (top row) and head-on collisions (bottom row). Post-collision wmf are plotted on the left y-axes and color– coded. Water accretion efficiencies ξw are plotted on the right y-axes. Grey circles indicate either pre-collision sizes (∝ mass1/3), or the projectile body (impacting from the top).

astro-ph.EP

Final water inventories of newly formed terrestrial planets are shaped by their collision history. A setting where volatiles are transported from beyond the snowline to habitable-zone planets suggests collisions of very dry with water-rich bodies.

By means of smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations we study water delivery in scenarios where a dry target is hit by a water-rich projectile, focusing on hit-and-run encounters with two large surviving bodies, which probably comprise about half of all similar-sized collisions.

C. Burger (1 and 2), T. I. Maindl (1), C. M. Schäfer (2) ((1) University of Vienna, Department of Astrophysics, Austria, (2) University of Tübingen, Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Germany)
(Submitted on 1 Feb 2020)
Comments: Published as IAU Symposium Proceedings
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Journal reference: Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 345, Jan 2020, pages 287-288
DOI: 10.1017/S1743921318008621
Cite as: arXiv:2002.00231 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2002.00231v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Christoph Burger
[v1] Sat, 1 Feb 2020 15:29:29 UTC (67 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.00231
Astrobiology

Keith Cowing

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻

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