Fate of the runner in hit-and-run collisions

Abstract

In similar-sized planetary collisions, a significant part of the impactor often misses the target and continues downrange. We follow the dynamical evolution of "runners" from giant impacts to determine their ultimate fate. Surprisingly, runners re-impact their target planets only about half of the time, for realistic collisional and dynamical scenarios. Otherwise they remain in orbit for tens of millions of years (the limit of our N-body calculations) and longer, or sometimes collide with a different planet than the first one. When the runner does return to collide again with the same arget planet, its impact velocity is mainly constrained by the outcome of the prior collision. Impact angle and orientation, however, are unconstrained by the prior collision.

arXiv comment24 pages, 14 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Realistic On-the-fly Outcomes of Planetary Collisions II: Bringing Machine Learning to N-body Simulations
• Giant Planet Scatterings and Collisions: Hydrodynamics, Merger-Ejection Branching Ratio, and Properties of the Remnants
• Realistic collisional water transport during terrestrial planet formation: Self-consistent modeling by an N-body--SPH hybrid code
• Collision Chains among the Terrestrial Planets. III. Formation of the Moon
• The Effect of Inefficient Accretion on Planetary Differentiation
• Investigating the Feasibility of an Impact-Induced Martian Dichotomy
• The Role of Giant Impacts in Planet Formation
• A race against the clock: Constraining the timing of cometary bombardment relative to Earth's growth
• Collision Chains among the Terrestrial Planets. II. An Asymmetry between Earth and Venus
• Ejection of close-in super-Earths around low-mass stars in the giant impact stage
• Graze-and-Merge Collisions under External Perturbers
• A Pluto-Charon Sonata III. Growth of Charon from a Circum-Pluto Ring of Debris
• Hypothetical hyperbolic encounters between Venus and proto-Mercury that partially \ stripped away proto-Mercury's mantle
• The energy budgets of giant impacts