Turn-PointsintheEvolutionofaPlanetary.pptVIP

ADVERTISEMENT I have money for a 3-year Ph.D. scholarship to work on modeling of terrestrial planet formation, starting from the fall 2009. If you know a good student who is interested in the subject, please put him/her in contact with me. Thanks morby@oca.eu SPECULATION I Why aren’t all asteroids melted? Need for a delayed start of the gravitational instability process Scott, 2007 SPECULATION II What about the same happened in the Kuiper belt? The observed knee in the SFD at D~100km would be a primordial feature and not the consequence of collisional grinding, unlike what is usually accepted (from Kenyon Bromley’s work) Then most of the initial mass would have been in large bodies; 30 Earth masses implies ~1,000 Pluto-size bodies, consistent with the Nice model, formation of the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud etc. A new mechanism to form binary TNOs? Kuiper Belt Binaries here we focus on ~100-km-class binaries with equal size  components and wide separations ~30% binary fraction among i5 deg classical KBOs  (Noll et al. 2008; 0.06’’ separations, 2 mag contrast) Large angular momentum and stability of binaries in the  current KB environment suggest early formation by capture Different capture models make different assumptions: E.g., Goldreich et al. (2002) favored bimodal size distribution  with ?/?~1000. Dynamical friction from s assures minimal  encounter speeds of 100-km bodies and facilitates capture Initial conditions and setup from Goldreich et al. (strong dynamical friction from small bodies promotes runaway growth) Initially bimodalsize distributions/S=1000, v=2 cm/s Coagulation Code Applied to KB Coagulation Code Applied to KB Like Kenyon Luu (1999), we also obtain a very shallow size distribution slope for D100 km. Inconsistent with observations. Reference slope with -5 index Size distribution  after 1 Myr Different possibility: Binaries formed during gravitational collapse in eddies of turb