The Influence of Central Body Tides on Catastrophic Disruptions of Close-in Planetary Satellites

Abstract

We model the outcomes of catastrophic disruptions on small, gravity-dominated natural satellites, accounting for the tidal potential of the central body, which is neglected in classical disruption scaling laws. We introduce the concept of $Q_{\text{TD}}^{\star }$, the specific energy required to disperse half of the total mass involved in a collision, accounting for the tidal potential of a central body. We derive a simple scaling relation for $Q_{\text{TD}}^{\star }$ and demonstrate that for close-in planetary or asteroidal satellites, the tides from the central body can significantly reduce their catastrophic disruption threshold. We show that many satellites in the Solar System are in such a regime, where their disruption threshold should be much lower than that predicted by classical scaling laws which neglect tidal effects. Some notable examples include Mars' Phobos, Jupiter's Metis and Adrastea, Saturn's ring moons, Uranus' Ophelia, and Neptune's Naiad and Thalassa, among others. We argue that traditional impact scaling laws should be modified to account for tides when modeling the formation and evolution of these close-in satellites. Our derivation for $Q_{\text{TD}}^{\star }$ can easily be used in existing $N$-body and collisional evolution codes.

arXiv commentPublished in ApJ, animations available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15790522

References in corpus (19)

• SciPy 1.0--Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python
• Array Programming with NumPy
• Catastrophic disruptions revisited
• Collisions Between Gravity-Dominated Bodies: 1. Outcome Regimes and Scaling Laws
• Collisions between Gravity-Dominated Bodies: 2. The Diversity of Impact Outcomes during the End Stage of Planet Formation
• Full Numerical Simulations of Catastrophic Small Body Collisions
• Fragment properties at the catastrophic disruption threshold: The effect of the parent body's internal structure
• SPH calculations of asteroid disruptions: The role of pressure dependent failure models
• Creep stability of the proposed AIDA mission target 65803 Didymos: I. Discrete cohesionless granular physics model
• The multifaceted planetesimal formation process
• Asteroid pairs: a complex picture
• Low-speed Impact Simulations into Regolith in Support of Asteroid Sampling Mechanism Design I.: Comparison with 1-g Experiments
• A Contact Binary Satellite of the Asteroid (152830) Dinkinesh
• Modeling asteroid collisions and impact processes
• Numerical Simulations of Collisional Disruption of Rotating Gravitational Aggregates: Dependence on Material Properties
• Forming Iron-rich Planets with Giant Impacts
• Orbits and resonances of the regular moons of Neptune
• Lessons learned from NASA's DART impact about disrupting rubble-pile asteroids
• Protoplanet collisions: new scaling laws from SPH simulations

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Tidal disruptions of rubble piles: The case of Phobos