Collisional Cascade Caclulations for Irregular Satellite Swarms in Fomalhaut b

Abstract

We describe an extensive suite of numerical calculations for the collisional evolution of irregular satellite swarms around 1--300 M-earth planets orbiting at 120 AU in the Fomalhaut system. For 10--100 M-earth planets, swarms with initial masses of roughly 1% of the planet mass have cross-sectional areas comparable to the observed cross-sectional area of Fomalhaut b. Among 30--300 M-earth planets, our calculations yield optically thick swarms of satellites for ages of 1-10 Myr. Observations with HST and ground-based AO instruments can constrain the frequency of these systems around stars in the beta Pic moving group and possibly other nearby associations of young stars.

46 pages, 30 figures, ApJ, accepted

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Detection of exocometary CO within the 440 Myr-old Fomalhaut belt: a similar CO+CO${}_2$ ice abundance in exocomets and Solar System comets
• Numerical Simulations of Collisional Cascades at the Roche Limits of White Dwarf Stars
• Spatially resolved imaging of the inner Fomalhaut disk using JWST/MIRI
• Numerical Simulations of Gaseous Disks Generated from Collisional Cascades at the Roche Limits of White Dwarf Stars
• New HST data and modeling reveal a massive planetesimal collision around Fomalhaut
• A Pluto-Charon Sonata III. Growth of Charon from a Circum-Pluto Ring of Debris