The Dynamics of Known Centaurs

By M. Tiscareno, R. Malhotra. 2002

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have numerically investigated the long-term dynamical behavior of known Centaurs. This class of objects is thought to constitute the transitional population between the Kuiper belt and the Jupiter-family comets (JFCs). In our study, we find that over their dynamical lifetimes these objects diffuse into the JFCs and other sinks, and they also make excursions into the scattered disk, but (not surprisingly) do not diffuse into the parameter space representing the main Kuiper belt. These Centaurs spend most of their dynamical lifetimes in orbits of eccentricity 0.2–0.6 and perihelion distance 12–30 AU. Their orbital evolution is characterized by frequent close encounters with the giant planets. Most of these Centaurs will escape from the solar system (or enter the Oort cloud), while a fraction will enter the JFC population and a few percent will impact a giant planet. Their median dynamical lifetime is 9 Myr, although there is a wide dispersion in lifetimes, ranging from less than 1 Myr to more than 100 Myr. We find the dynamical evolution of this sample of Centaurs to be less orderly than the planet-to-planet "handoff" described in previous investigations. We discuss the implications of our study for the spatial distribution of the Centaurs as a whole.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a1adff2388284bc10604fb84fac3d5aea378c35

How researchers see this paper

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Jewitt
2. Kathryn Volk
3. R. Malhotra
4. J. Hahn
5. H. Rickman
6. Jean-Loup Bertaux
7. G. Kovacs
8. Stefano Mottola

Citations in the corpus

• The Scattered Disk as the Source of the Jupiter Family Comets (2008, background): “The Centaurs, the transitional population between trans-Neptunian objects and the JFCs, undergo frequent close encounters with the giant planets (Tiscareno & Malhotra 2003).”
• THE ACTIVE CENTAURS (2006, background): “Numerical simulations give half-lives from 0.5 Myr to 30 Myr, with average values increasing with semimajor axis and perihelion distance (Horner et al. 2004) and a population median lifetime near 10 Myr (Tiscareno and Malhotra 2003).”
• The primordial nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (2015, background): “They quote the work by Tiscareno & Malhotra (2003) who performed orbital integrations for 53 real Centaurs, showing that they collectively passed 8× 103 times within the Hill radius of a giant planet during their dynamical lifetimes.”
• Neptune’s Migration into a Stirred-Up Kuiper Belt: A Detailed Comparison of Simulations to Observations (2005, background): “Since planet–crossers are quickly ejected or accreted, Centaurs have short dynamical lifetimes of only ∼ 107 years (Levison & Duncan 1997; Tiscareno & Malhotra 2003).”