Migration of Trans-Neptunian Objects to the Terrestrial Planets

Abstract

The orbital evolution of more than 22000 Jupiter-crossing objects under the gravitational influence of planets was investigated. We found that the mean collision probabilities of Jupiter-crossing objects (from initial orbits close to the orbit of a comet) with the terrestrial planets can differ by more than two orders of magnitude for different comets. For initial orbital elements close to those of some comets (e.g. 2P and 10P), about 0.1% of objects got Earth-crossing orbits with semi-major axes a<2 AU and moved in such orbits for more than a Myr (up to tens or even hundreds of Myrs). Results of our runs testify in favor of at least one of these conclusions: 1) the portion of 1-km former trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) among near-Earth objects (NEOs) can exceed several tens of percents, 2) the number of TNOs migrating inside solar system could be smaller by a factor of several than it was earlier considered, 3) most of 1-km former TNOs that had got NEO orbits disintegrated into mini-comets and dust during a smaller part of their dynamical lifetimes if these lifetimes are not small.

Earth, Moon, and Planets [Proceedings of the international scientific workshop on the "First Decadal Review of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt - Towards New Frontiers" (11-14 March 2003, Antofagasta, Chile)]. In press

References in corpus (4)

• Long-Term Dynamics and the Orbital Inclinations of the Classical Kuiper Belt Objects
• Comet and Asteroid Hazard to the Terrestrial Planets
• Orbital evolution of the P/1996 R2 and P/1996 N2 objects
• Formation and migration of trans-Neptunian objects and asteroids

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Dynamical Zodiacal Cloud Models Constrained by High Resolution Spectroscopy of the Zodiacal Light (Icarus, in press)
• Migration processes in the Solar System and their role in the evolution of the Earth and planets
• Migration of Small Bodies and Dust to Near-Earth Space
• Probabilities of collisions of planetesimals from different regions of the feeding zone of the terrestrial planets with the forming planets and the Moon
• Number of near-Earth objects and formation of lunar craters over the last billion years
• Collision probabilities of migrating small bodies and dust particles with planets
• Growth of the Moon due to bodies ejected from the Earth
• Migration of Comets to the Terrestrial Planets
• Probabilities of collisions of bodies ejected from forming Earth with the terrestrial planets
• Migration of celestial bodies in the Solar system and in several exoplanetary systems