Scenarios for the Origin of the Orbits of the Trans-Neptunian Objects 2000 CR105 and 2003 VB12 (Sedna)

By A. Morbidelli, Harold Levison. 2004

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Explaining the origin of the orbits of 2000 CR105 (a = 230 AU, q = 44 AU) and 2003 VB12 (a = 531 AU, q = 74 AU, unofficially known as Sedna) is a major test for our understanding of the primordial evolution of the outer solar system. Gladman et al. have shown that 2000 CR105 could not have been a normal member of the scattered disk that had its perihelion distance increased by chaotic diffusion. The same conclusion also clearly applies to 2003 VB12. In this paper, we explore five seemingly promising mechanisms to explain the origin of the orbits of these peculiar objects: (1) the passage of Neptune through a high-eccentricity phase, (2) the past existence of massive planetary embryos in the Kuiper belt or the scattered disk, (3) the presence of a massive trans-Neptunian disk at early epochs that perturbed highly inclined scattered-disk objects, (4) encounters with other stars that perturbed the orbits of some of the solar system's trans-Neptunian planetesimals, and (5) the capture of extrasolar planetesimals from low-mass stars or brown dwarfs encountering the Sun. Of all these mechanisms, the ones giving the most satisfactory results are those related to the passage of stars (4 and 5). An important advantage of both stellar-passage scenarios is that all the resulting objects with large perihelion distances also have large semimajor axes. This is in good agreement with the fact that 2000 CR105 and 2003 VB12 have semimajor axes larger than 200 AU and no other bodies with similar perihelion distances but smaller semimajor axes have yet been discovered. We favor mechanism 4, since it produces an orbital element distribution that is more consistent with the observations, unless 2000 CR105 and 2003 VB12 represent a population more massive than a few tenths of an Earth mass, in which case this mechanism is not viable.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d25db610075ce2fad1f5845496b78824fbd01963

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Morbidelli
2. D. Nesvorný
3. Harold Levison
4. M. Brown
5. Fred C. Adams
6. R. Malhotra
7. R. Brasser
8. K. Batygin

Citations in the corpus

• Embedded star clusters and the formation of the Oort Cloud (2006, background): “In other words it appears unlikely that one can produce an object like 2003 UB313 and leave the Kuiper Belt intact and the observations seem to favor a looser cluster (Morbidelli and Levison, 2004).”
• The Birth Environment of the Solar System (2010, background): “In one model, Sedna initially resides in the scattered disk and has its perihelion lifted by the encounter (Morbidelli & Levison 2004; Brasser et al. 2006); in another model, the encounter scatters Sedna from the Kuiper belt into its observed eccentric orbit (Kenyon & Bromley 2004).”
• THE CANADA–FRANCE ECLIPTIC PLANE SURVEY—L3 DATA RELEASE: THE ORBITAL STRUCTURE OF THE KUIPER BELT (2009, background): “This population has a pericenter distribution with very few q’s above 40 AU, and541 may very well have been emplaced as a sort of fossilized scattered disk (Gladman et al. 2002) as illustrated542 in Morbidelli & Levison (2004).”
• The planet nine hypothesis (2019, background): “First, such objects cannot be generated simply through interactions with Neptune, and require an additional source of external gravitational perturbations (Morbidelli and Levison, 2004).”
• Neptune’s Migration into a Stirred-Up Kuiper Belt: A Detailed Comparison of Simulations to Observations (2005, background): “External perturbations from passing stars (Fernández & Brunini 2000; Morbidelli & Levison 2004) may indeed be more effective at producing members of the Extended Scattered Disk.”
• Discovery of a Planetary-sized Object in the Scattered Kuiper Belt (2005, background): “…bright objects are invaluable as targets for detailed physical study (Marchi et al. 2003; Jewitt & Luu 2004; de Bergh et al. 2005; Trujillo et al. 2005) in addition to being potential beacons of previously unknown populations (Brown et al. 2004; Kenyon & Bromley 2004; Morbidelli & Levison 2004).”