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Rapid collisional evolution of comets during the formation of the Oort cloud

Nature volume 409, pages 589–591 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

The Oort cloud1 of comets was formed by the ejection of icy planetesimals from the region of giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—during their formation2. Dynamical simulations3,4 have previously shown that comets reach the Oort cloud only after being perturbed into eccentric orbits that result in close encounters with the giant planets, which then eject them to distant orbits about 104 to 105 AU from the Sun (1 AU is the average Earth–Sun distance). All of the models constructed until now simulate formation of the Oort cloud using only gravitational effects; these include the influence of the Sun, the planets and external perturbers such as passing stars and Galactic tides. Here we show that physical collisions between comets and small debris play a fundamental and hitherto unexplored role throughout most of the ejection process. For standard models of the protosolar nebula (starting with a minimum-mass nebula) we find that collisional evolution of comets is so severe that their erosional lifetimes are much shorter than the timescale for dynamical ejection. It therefore appears that collisions will prevent most comets escaping from most locations in the region of the giant planets until the disk mass there declines sufficiently that the dynamical ejection timescale is shorter than the collisional lifetime. One consequence is that the total mass of comets in the Oort cloud may be less than currently believed.

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Figure 1: Estimated time required for cometary nuclei to collide with 50% of their own mass in solids in the solar nebula as a function of distance from the Sun.
Figure 2: Estimated erosion lifetimes for icy planetesimals, embedded in a disk-like, primordial solar nebula between 5 and 50 AU from the Sun.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Duncan, K. Grazier and H. Levison for discussions, and D. Durda, W. Merline, A. Morbidelli, W. Ward and most particularly L. Dones for comments on this manuscript. This work was performed in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory under contract with NASA, and was supported by the NASA Planetary Geology and Geophysics and NASA Origins Programs.

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  1. Space Studies Department, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, 80302, Colorado, USA

    S. Alan Stern

  2. Earth and Space Sciences Division, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, 91109, California, USA

    Paul R. Weissman

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Correspondence to S. Alan Stern.

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Stern, S., Weissman, P. Rapid collisional evolution of comets during the formation of the Oort cloud. Nature 409, 589–591 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35054508

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