Hi there! You may know that our Solar System has had a catastrophic youth, destructive impacts playing an inescapable role in sculpting its structure. The paper I present you today, Constraints on the pre-impact orbits of Solar System giant impactors, by Alan P. Jackson, Travis S.J. Gabriel & Erik I. Asphaug, proposes an efficient way to determine the orbit of a giant impactor before the impact. This tells us where this impactor could have come from. The study has recently been published in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Giant impacts in the Solar System

In its early history, the Solar System was composed of many small bodies, i.e. many much than now, most of them having been cleared since then. They have been cleared because the gravitational perturbation of the planets made their orbits unstable. They may also have been destroyed by collisions. Before the clearing was completed, the presence of so many bodies favored intense bombardments. You know for instance the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB), which probably happened 4 Byr ago, during 200 Myr.
The violence and the outcome of an impact depend on the relative sizes of the target and the impactor, and their relative velocities. Here, the relative velocity should be seen as a vector, i.e. not only the velocity itself is important (the norm of the vector), but its orientation as well, since it directly affects the incidence angle. The craters on the surface of telluric planets, asteroids, and planetary satellites tell us about the history of the bodies, and are the signature of such bombardment. They have been excavated by impactors of moderate size. But now, imagine that the impactor has the size of a planetary body. This is what the authors address as giant impactors.
Giant impactors could have been responsible for

• the formation of the Moon,
• the removal of light elements on Mercury,
• the formation of the two satellites of Mars, Phobos and Deimos,
• the tilt of Uranus,
• the disruption of dwarf planets, creating asteroids families,
• the rings of Saturn,

and many more.

2 kinds of massive impacts

When two bodies of pretty similar size collide, they could

• either be destroyed, or just one of them be destroyed,
• survive.

The last case is known as hit-and-run. It happens when the impact is tangential, like between two billiard balls. But it is a little more complicated, of course. This last decade has seen the publication of many Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations, in which the impactor and the target are modeled as aggregates of particles. Their mutual interactions are of course considered. Such simulations permit to model the differentiated composition of the two involved bodies, i.e. heavy elements constitute the core, while lighter ones make the mantle, and to trace the outcome of the different geochimical components during and after the impact. This way, the results can be compared with our knowledge of the composition of the bodies. We can evaluate which fraction of the material of the impactor is finally reaccreted on the target, and we can also determine the consequences of hit-and-run collisions. It appears that these collisions do not leave the two bodies intact, but they may strip them from their outer layers.

Why determining their origin

It appeared from the simulations and from the observed compositions of planetary bodies, like the Earth-Moon pair, that impacts do affect the composition of the resulting bodies, and that the difference of composition between the target and the impactor may result in variations of composition after the process is completed, i.e. not only the collision, but also the coalescence of the dust cloud and the reaccretion of the debris. Determining the composition of an impacted planetary body can tell us something on the composition of the impactor.
The composition of planetary bodies depend on their location in the Solar System. The distance with the Sun affects the temperature, which itself affects the viscoelastic properties of the material. Moreover, the initial protoplanetary nebula which gave birth to the Solar System had probably a radial dependent composition, which affected the composition of the resulting planetary bodies. If we could know where an impactor came from, that would tell us something on the primordial Solar System.

The impact velocity gives the orbit of the impactor

In 2014 the first author, i.e. Alan P. Jackson, while he was in UK, lead a study in which the orbital elements of the impacted bodies were determined, in modeling the impact as an impulsive velocity kick. In the present study, the authors invert the formulae, to get the pre-impact elements from the post-impact ones, which are observed, and from the impact velocity, which is estimated by other studies.

This seems easy, but actually is not. One of the problem is that the uncertainties on the impact velocity translates into a family of possible pre-impact elements. Anyway, they give constraints on the semimajor axis, eccentricity and inclination of the impactor. Something very interesting with this method is that the inversion of analytical formulae is very fast with a computer, i.e. you can have the result in a few seconds, maybe less, while the classical method would consist to run N-body simulations during days, where you model the motions of thousands of candidate-impactors (of which you know nothing), until you observe a collision… or not.

In determining the possible pre-impact orbital elements, the authors can assess whether the impactors are likely to fall on the Sun, or to cross the orbit of another planet. In particular, a Sun-grazing solution should obviously be rejected. Moreover, the authors consider that an impactor which would have crossed the orbit of Jupiter would probably have been ejected from the Solar System. As a consequence, such a solution has only a low probability.

And now, let us have a look at the results! The authors applied their method on the formation of the Moon, of Mercury, and on the northern hemisphere of Mars.

A slow impact formed the Moon

It is widely accepted that a giant impactor, nicknamed Theia, has split the proto-Earth between the Earth and the Moon. The literature proposes us three scenarios:

1. A canonical scenario, in which Theia is a Mars-sized object,
2. A hit-and-run scenario, in which only part of Theia constitutes the protolunar disk,
3. A violent scenario, which assumes that the Earth spun very fast at the time of the impact, and that the total angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system was twice the present one. This last scenario requires high impact velocities.

It appears from the results that the last of these scenarios, which requires high velocities, is much less probable than the others, because high velocities translate into highly eccentric orbits. Highly eccentric orbits are the less stable ones, in particular many of them cross the orbit of Jupiter, which could eject them from the Solar System.
So, a conclusion of this study is that the formation of the Moon probably results from a low velocity impact between the proto-Earth and Theia.

Stripping Mercury from its light elements

The composition of Mercury is intriguing, since it is anomalously dense with respect to its size. It is as if the observed Mercury would only be the core of a planet. A proposed explanation is that the proto-Mercury was composed of that core and a mantle of lighter elements (an alternative one is a depletion of lighter elements in the protoplanetary nebula in that region of the Solar System). And of course, it has been imagined that the removal of the mantle is due to a giant impact.

Two scenarios are present in the literature:

1. A violent impact on the proto-Mercury, which would have removed the mantle,
2. A succession of hit-and-run collisions in which the proto-Mercury would have been the impactor on the proto-Earth and / or the proto-Venus, and which would have been progressively enriched in iron.

The authors consider the multiple hit-and-run scenario as the most probable one, since it is the one involving the smallest velocities, and limits the possibility of gravitational scattering by Jupiter.

A giant impact on Mars

The North Polar Basin of Mars, or Borealis Basin, covers 40% of the surface of Mars. It may be the largest impact basin in the Solar System, and it creates a dichotomy between the northern and the southern hemispheres.

The authors stress that the exact location of Mars at the date of the impact does affect the results, in particular Earth-crossing orbits are allowed only is Mars was close to its pericentre (the location on its orbit, where it is the closest to the Sun). Anyway, they find that the impactor should have had an orbit close to the one of Mars, and suggest that its semimajor axis could have been between 1.2 and 2.2 astronomical unit (the one of Mars being 1.52 AU).

The study and its authors

• The study, made freely available by the authors on arXiv, thanks to them for sharing!
• The web site of Alan P. Jackson,
• the one of Travis S.J. Gabriel,
• and the one of Erik I. Asphaug.

And that’s it for today! Please do not forget to comment. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook.