Will New Horizons see dust clumps in the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt?

Abstract

Debris disks are thought to be sculptured by neighboring planets. The same is true for the Edgeworth-Kuiper debris disk, yet no direct observational evidence for signatures of giant planets in the Kuiper belt dust distribution has been found so far. Here we model the dust distribution in the outer solar system to reproduce the dust impact rates onto the dust detector onboard the New Horizons spacecraft measured so far and to predict the rates during the Neptune orbit traverse. To this end, we take a realistic distribution of transneptunian objects to launch a sufficient number of dust grains of different sizes and follow their orbits by including radiation pressure, Poynting-Robertson and stellar wind drag, as well as the perturbations of four giant planets. In a subsequent statistical analysis, we calculate number densities and lifetimes of the dust grains in order to simulate a collisional cascade. In contrast to the previous work, our model not only considers collisional elimination of particles, but also includes production of finer debris. We find that particles captured in the 3:2 resonance with Neptune build clumps that are not removed by collisions, because the depleting effect of collisions is counteracted by production of smaller fragments. Our model successfully reproduces the dust impact rates measured by New Horizons out to ~23AU and predicts an increase of the impact rate of about a factor of two or three around the Neptune orbit crossing. This result is robust with respect to the variation of the vaguely known number of dust-producing scattered disk objects, collisional outcomes, and the dust properties.

arXiv comment10 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomical Journal

References in corpus (20)

• A giant planet imaged in the disk of the young star Beta Pictoris
• Optical Images of an Exosolar Planet 25 Light Years from Earth
• Catastrophic disruptions revisited
• A probable giant planet imaged in the Beta Pictoris disk
• The Debris Disk Around HR 8799
• Resonant Trapping of Planetesimals by Planet Migration: Debris Disk Clumps and Vega's Similarity to the Solar System
• Discovery of a probable 4-5 Jupiter-mass exoplanet to HD 95086 by direct-imaging
• STIS Coronagraphic Imaging of Fomalhaut: Main Belt Structure and the Orbit of Fomalhaut b
• Dust in Resonant Extrasolar Kuiper Belts - Grain Size and Wavelength Dependence of Disk Structure
• A Study of the Dynamics of Dust from the Kuiper Belt: Spatial Distribution and Spectral Energy Distribution
• beta Pic b position relative to the Debris Disk
• Spiral Structure when Setting up Pericentre Glow: Possible Giant Planets at Hundreds of AU in the HD141569 Disk
• Origins of Solar System Dust Beyond Jupiter
• Dynamical models of Kuiper Belt dust in the inner and outer Solar System
• Interstellar Medium Sculpting of the HD 32297 Disk
• Collisional dust avalanches in debris discs
• Collisional Grooming Models of the Kuiper Belt Dust Cloud
• An improved model of the Edgeworth-Kuiper debris disk
• A general model of resonance capture in planetary systems: First and second order resonances
• The Edgeworth-Kuiper debris disk

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission
• A SMACK Model of Colliding Planetesimals in the $\beta$ Pictoris Debris Disk
• Origin of Interplanetary Dust through Optical Properties of Zodiacal Light
• Collisions and drag in debris discs with eccentric parent belts
• Capture and evolution of dust in planetary mean-motion resonances: a fast, semi-analytic method for generating resonantly trapped disk images
• Extrasolar Kuiper Belts