Category Archives: Comets

Comets

An active asteroid

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Hi there! Today we will detail a recent study by Jessica Agarwal and Michael Mommert, entitled Nucleus of active asteroid 358P/Pan-STARRS (P/2012 T1). This study has recently been accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics, and consists in increasing our knowledge of a recently discovered object, i.e. P/2012 T1. This object proved to have some activity, like a comet. The authors realized several observations to try to characterize its activity, and infer some physical properties like its size and its rotation.

Outline

Comet vs. active asteroid
The asteroid P/2012 T1
New observations
Measuring its rotation
Dust emission
A 530m-large body
The study and its authors

Comet vs. active asteroid

First of all, I would like to make clear what is a comet, and what is an active asteroid. I am very ambitious here, since these two notions actually overlap. For instance, our object is both an active asteroid, and a main-belt comet.

Let us say that a comet is an active asteroid, while an active asteroid is not necessarily a comet. The difference is in the nature of the activity.

A comet is a dirty snowball, i.e. you have water ice, and some silicates. Its orbit around the Sun is usually pretty eccentric, so that you have large variations of the distance Sun-object. The location of the orbit, at which the distance is the smallest, is called pericentre. When the comet approaches the pericentre, it approaches the Sun, heats, and part of its water ice sublimates. This results in a dusty tail (actually there are two tails, one being composed of ionized particles).

But when you see dust around a small body, i.e. when you see activity, this is not necessarily ice sublimation. There could be for instance rock excavated by an impact, or material expelled by fast rotation. In that case, you still have an active asteroid, but not a comet. One of the goals of this study is to address the cause and nature of P/2012 T1’s activity.

The asteroid P/2012 T1

P/2012 T1, now named 358P, has been discovered in October 2012 by the Pan-STARRS-1 survey. Pan-STARRS stands for Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, it uses dedicated facilities at Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii, USA.

Discovery of P/2012 T1. © Pan-STARRS
Discovery of P/2012 T1. © Pan-STARRS

Its provisional name, P/2012 T1, contains information on the nature of the object, and its discovery. P stands for periodic comet, 2012 is the year of the discovery, and T means that it has been discovered during the first half of October.

Interestingly, this object appeared on images taken in December 2001 at Palomar Observatory in California, while acquiring data for the survey NEAT (Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking).

You can find below its orbital elements, from the Minor Planet Center:

Semi-major axis 3.1504519 AU
Eccentricity 0.2375768
Inclination 11.05645°
Period 5.59 y

From its orbital dynamics, it is a Main-Belt object. As a comet, it is a Main-Belt Comet.

New observations

Once an object is known and we know where it is, it is much easier to reobserve it. The authors conducted observations of 358P from the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope, and the Very Large Telescope.

The SOAR telescope is based on Cerro Pachón, Chile. This is a 4.1-m aperture facility, located at an altitude of 2,700 m. The authors took images with the Goodman High Throughput Spectrograph during one night, from July 27 to July 28, 2017. They wanted to analyze the reflected light by the asteroid at different wavelengths, unfortunately the observational constraints, i.e. cloud coverage, permitted only two hours of observations. Only the observations made with the VR filter, centered at 610 nm, were useful.

These data were supplemented by 77 images taken during 10 hours from August 17 to August 18, 2017, at the Very Large Telescope. This instrument depends on the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and is located on Cerro Paranal, once more in Chile, at an altitude of 2,635 m. The authors used the FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2), which central wavelength is 655 nm.

The observations give raw images. The authors treated them to get reliable photometric and astrometric measurements of 358P, i.e. they corrected from the variations of the luminosity of the sky, in using reference stars, and from the possible instrumental problems. For that, they recorded the response of the instrument to a surface of uniform brightness, and used the outcome to correct their images.

Let us now address the results.

Measuring its rotation

Such a small (sub-kilometric) body is not spherical. This results in variations of luminosity, which depend on the surface element which is actually facing your telescope. If you acquire data during several spin periods of the asteroid, then you should see some periodicity in the recorded lightcurve.

The best way to extract the periods is to make a Fourier transform. Your input is the time-dependent lightcurve you have recorded, and your output is a frequency-dependent curve, which should emphasize the periods, which are present in the recorded lightcurve. If the signal is truly periodic, then it should exhibit a maximum at its period and its harmonics (i.e. twice the period, thrice the period, etc.), and almost 0 outside (not exactly 0 since you always have some noise).

In the case of 358P, the authors did not identify any clear period. A maximum is present for a rotation period of 8 hours, but the result is too noisy to be conclusive. A possible explanation could be that we have a polar view of the asteroid. Another possibility is that the albedo of the asteroid (the fraction of reflected light) is almost uniform.

Dust emission

The authors tried to detect debris around the nucleus of the comet, in widening the aperture over which the photometry was performed. They got no real detection, which tends to rule out the possibility of non-cometary activity.

A 530m-large body

Finally, the magnitude of the asteroid is the one of a sphere of 530 meters in diameter, with an albedo of 6%. This means that a higher albedo would give a smaller size, and conversely. The albedo depends on the composition of the asteroid, which is unknown, and can be only inferred from other asteroids. The authors assumed it to be a carbonaceous asteroid (C-type), as 75% of the asteroids. If it were an S-type (silicateous) body, then it would be brighter. A wide band spectrum of the reflected light would give us this information.

The study and its authors

  • You can find the study here, on Astronomy and Astrophysics’ website. Moreover, the authors uploaded a free version on arXiv, thanks to them for sharing!
  • Here is the webpage of the first author, Jessica Agarwal,
  • and here the website of Michael Mommert.

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, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Asteroids: Main Belt, Comets

Some comets are not randomly distributed

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Hi there! Everybody knows the comets, which may show us impressive tails, when they approach our Sun. This is due to what we call cometary activity. You can find comets in many places in the Solar System. Today we will focus on the 9 ones, which are located in the Main Asteroid Belt, i.e. between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This is the opportunity to present you Orbital alignment of Main-belt comets, by Yoonyoung Kim, Yougmin JeongAhn, and Henry H. Hsieh. This study has recently been published in The Astronomical Journal.

Outline

Comets in the Solar System
The Main-Belt Comets
Proper, forced, and osculating elements
The Main-Belt Comets are clustered
Where are the other MBC?
Clustering of TNOs suggests the existence of the Planet Nine
The study and its authors

Comets in the Solar System

A comet is a small body, which presents some activity. This activity manifests as 2 tails, which are a gas tail and a dust tail. These two tails have different directions because the dust is heavier than the gas, and so is differently affected by the Sun. The Sun is actually responsible for at least part of this activity: if the body has water ice at its surface, the proximity of the Sun heats it enough to sublimate it.

We distinguish different classes of comets, from their orbital motion. The short-period comets have a period below 200 years, i.e. they make a close approach to the Sun periodically, with less than 200 years between two approaches. This is for instance the case of the famous Halley comet, or 1P/Halley, which period is 75 years. The comets with a period smaller than 20 years are called Jupiter-family comets, their orbits are strongly affected by the gravitational perturbation of Jupiter.
And we also have long-period comets, with periods larger than 200 years, up to several thousands of years, or even more… The extreme case is the one of the parabolic and hyperbolic comets, which eccentricities are close to or larger than 1. In such a case, we just see the comet once.

The Jupiter-family comets should originate from the Kuiper Belt, and have been so strongly perturbed by Jupiter that their semimajor axes became much smaller, reducing their orbital periods. However, we attribute the origin of the longer periods comets to the Oort cloud, which is thought to lie between 50,000 and 200,000 astronomical units (remember: the Sun-Earth distance is 1 AU). The comets we are interested in today are much closer, in the Main-Belt of asteroids.

The Main-Belt Comets

Main Belt Comets (MBCs) are comets, which are located in the asteroid belt. As such, they present some cometary activity. It appears that there is no general agreement on the way to identify them. Some asteroids present an activity, which is mainly driven by dust, and not by sublimation of water ice, so it could be relevant to call them active asteroids instead of comets. But they may have some sublimation driven activity as well.

The first identified MBC is 133P/Elst-Pizarro, which has been discovered in 1979 and is since then identified as an asteroid… and also as a comet since 1996. I mean, this is officially both a comet and an asteroid. The authors considered 9 MBC, there could be a little more of them, since classifying them is not that easy.

The comet Elst-Pizarro seen at La Silla Observatory. © ESO
The comet Elst-Pizarro seen at La Silla Observatory. © ESO

The MBC should originate from the Main-Belt. In this study, we are interested in the orbital dynamics. Let us talk about orbital elements.

Proper, forced, and osculating elements

As I have already told you in a previous post, we usually describe the orbit of a planetary body with 6 orbital elements, which characterize the ellipse drawn by the trajectory.

These orbital elements are

  • the semi-major axes (which would be the distance to the Sun, if the orbit were circular… this remains almost true for slightly eccentric orbits),
  • the mean longitude,
  • the eccentricity of the trajectory (0 means circular, the eccentricity must be smaller than 1 for the orbit to be elliptic),
  • the pericentre, i.e. location of the point of the trajectory, where the distance to the Sun is minimal,
  • the inclination, with respect to a given reference plane,
  • the ascending node, which locates the intersection between the reference plane and the orbit.

We call them osculating elements. These are the elements that the orbit would have at a given time, if it were exactly an ellipse. The real trajectory is very close to an ellipse, actually.

We will just keep in mind the two couples (eccentricity, pericentre), and (inclination, ascending node). Because these variables are coupled: without eccentricity, the pericentre is irrelevant, since the distance Sun-body is constant. And without inclination, the ascending node is irrelevant, since the whole trajectory is in the reference plane.

And these variables are the sums of a proper and a forced component. Imagine you are a MBC. You want to have your own motion around the Sun. This gives you the proper (or free) component, which is actually ruled by your initial conditions, and the interaction with the Sun (what we call the 2-body, or Kepler, problem). Unfortunately for you, there is this big guy perturbing your motion (Jupiter is his name). He is heavy enough to force your motion to follow his. This gives you a forced motion, and the actual motion is the sum of the proper and the forced ones. The forced motion tends to align your pericentre and your ascending node with the ones of Jupiter. The authors studied these motions.

The Main-Belt Comets are clustered

And their conclusions is that the MBC are clustered, in particular the pericentres. They tend to be aligned with the one of Jupiter. This could have been anticipated, but the authors found something more: the MBC are more clustered than the others asteroids, which lie in that region of the outer main-belt.

For quantifying this more clustered, they ran several statistical tests, which I do not want to detail (the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, the F-test, and the Watson’s U2 test). These tests show that this excess of clustering happened very unlikely by chance. In other words, there is something. And this is more obvious for comets, for which the sublimation activity is overwhelming. This permits the authors to make a link between this activity, i.e. the presence of water ice, and this clustering. And to suggest favorable conditions for the detection of cometary activity for Main-Belt objects.

Where are the other MBCs?

Based on the result that the eccentricities of MBCs are secularly excited by Jupiter, the authors suggest to look for them in the fall night sky, when Jupiter’s perihelion is at opposition.
We would not necessarily be looking for new bodies, but also for cometary activity of already known bodies. Because of the variations of the distance with the Sun, the sublimation of water ice is not a permanent phenomenon. Remember that Elst-Pizarro has been classified as a comet 17 years after its discovery.

Clustering of TNOs suggests the existence of the Planet Nine

I would like to finish with a reminder that the Planet Nine was hinted that way, in 2016. A clustering among the orbits of Trans-Neptunian Objects was statistically proven. Since then, the Planet Nine has not been detected (yet), but other clues have suggested its presence, like the obliquity of the Sun.

More generally, I would say that big objects strongly affect the orbits of small ones, and in observing the small ones, then you can deduce something on the big ones!

The study and its authors

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, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Comets

9 interstellar asteroids?

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Hi there! You may have recently heard of 1I/’Oumuamua, initially known as C/2017 U1, then A/2017 U1 (see here), where C stands for comet, A for asteroid, and I for interstellar object. This small body visited us last fall on a hyperbolic orbit, i.e. it came very fast from very far away, flew us by, and then left… and we shall never see it again. ‘Oumuamua has probably been formed in another planetary system, and its visit has motivated numerous studies. Some observed it to determine its shape, its composition, its rotation… and some conducted theoretical studies to understand its origin, its orbit… The study I present you today, Where the Solar system meets the solar neighbourhood: patterns in the distribution of radiants of observed hyperbolic minor bodies, by Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, and Sverre J. Aarseth, is a theoretical one, but with a broader scope. This study examines the orbits of 339 objects on hyperbolic orbits, to try to determine their origin, in particular which of them might be true interstellar interlopers. This study has recently been accepted for publication in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Outline

‘Oumuamua
Hyperbolic orbits
339 hyperbolic objects
Some perturbed by another star
8 candidate interlopers
The study and its authors

‘Oumuamua

I detail the discovery of ‘Oumuamua there. Since that post, we know that ‘Oumuamua is a red dark object, probably dense. It is tumbling, i.e. does not rotate around a single rotation axis, in about 8 hours. The uncertainties on the rotation period are pretty important, because of this tumbling motion. Something really unexpected is huge variations of brightness, which should reveal either a cigar-shaped object, or an object with extreme variations of albedo, i.e. bright regions alternating with dark ones… but that would be inconsistent with the spectroscopy, revealing a reddish object. This is why the dimensions of ‘Oumuamua are estimated to be 230 × 35 × 35 meters.

Artist's impression of 'Oumuamua. © ESO/M. Kornmesser
Artist’s impression of ‘Oumuamua. © ESO/M. Kornmesser

One wonders where ‘Oumuamua comes from. An extrapolation of its orbit shows that it comes from the current direction of the star Vega, in constellation Lyra… but when it was there, the star was not there, since it moved… We cannot actually determine around which star, and when, ‘Oumuamua has been formed.

Anyway, it was a breakthrough discovery, as the first certain interstellar object, with an eccentricity of 1.2. But other bodies have eccentricities larger than 1, which make them unstable in the Solar System, i.e. gravitationally unbound to the Sun… Could some of them be interstellar interlopers? This is the question addressed by the study. If you want to understand what I mean by eccentricity, hyperbolic orbit… just read the next section.

Hyperbolic orbits

The simplest orbit you can find is a circular one: the Sun is at the center, and the planetary object moves on a circle around the Sun. In such a case, the eccentricity of the orbit is 0. Now, if you get a little more eccentric, the trajectory becomes elliptical, and you will have periodic variations of the distance between the Sun and the object. And the Sun will not be at the center of the trajectory anymore, but at a focus. The eccentricity of the Earth is 0.017, which induces a closest distance of 147 millions km, and a largest one of 152 millions km… these variations are pretty limited. However, Halley’s comet has an eccentricity of 0.97. And if you exceed 1, then the trajectory will not be an ellipse anymore, but a branch of hyperbola. In such a case, the object can just make a fly-by of the Sun, before going back to the interstellar space.

Wait, it is a little more complicated than that. In the last paragraph, I assumed that the eccentricity, and more generally the orbital elements, were constant. This is true if you have only the Sun and your object (2-body, or Kepler, problem). But you have the gravitational perturbations of planets, stars,… and the consequence is that these orbital elements vary with time. You so may have a hyperbolic orbit becoming elliptical, in which case an interstellar interloper gets trapped, or conversely a Solar System object might be ejected, its eccentricity getting larger than 1.

The authors listed three known mechanisms, likely to eject a Solar System object:

  1. Close encounter with a planet,
  2. Secular interaction with the Galactic disk (in other words, long term effects due to the cumulative interactions with the stars constituting our Milky Way),
  3. Close encounter with a star.

339 hyperbolic objects

The authors identified 339 objects, which had an eccentricity larger than 1 on 2018 January 18. The objects were identified thanks to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Small-Body Database, and the Minor Planet Center database. The former is due to NASA, and the latter to the International Astronomical Union.

Once the authors got their inputs, they numerically integrated their orbits backward, over 100 kyr. These integrations were made thanks to a dedicated N-body code, powerful and optimized for long-term integration. Such algorithm is far from trivial. It consists in numerically integrating the equations of the motion of all of these 339 objects, perturbed by the Sun, the eight planets, the system Pluto-Charon, and the largest asteroids, in paying attention to the numerical errors at each iteration. This step is critical, to guarantee the validity of the results.

Some perturbed by another star

And here is the result: the authors have found that some of these objects had an elliptical orbit 100 kyr ago, meaning that they probably formed around the Sun, and are on the way to be expelled. The authors also computed the radiants of the hyperbolic objects, i.e. the direction from where they came, and they found an anisotropic distribution, i.e. there are preferred directions. Such a result has been obtained in comparing the resulting radiants from the ones given by a random process, and the distance between these 2 results is estimated to be statistically significant enough to conclude an anisotropic distribution. So, this result in not based on a pattern detected by the human eye, but on statistical calculations.

In particular, the authors noted an excess of radiants in the direction of the binary star WISE J072003.20-084651.2, also known as Scholz’s star, which is currently considered as the star having had the last closest approach to our Solar System, some 70 kilo years ago. In other words, the objects having a radiant in that direction are probably Solar System objects, and more precisely Oort cloud objects, which are being expelled because of the gravitational kick given by that star.

8 candidate interlopers

So, there is a preferred direction for the radiants, but ‘Oumuamua, which is so eccentric that it is the certain interstellar object, is an outlier in this radiant distribution, i.e. its radiant is not in the direction of Scholz’s star, and so cannot be associated with this process. Moreover, its asymptotical velocity, i.e. when far enough from the Sun, is too large to be bound to the Sun. And this happens for 8 other objects, which the authors identify as candidate interstellar interlopers. These 8 objects are

  • C/1853 RA (Brunhs),
  • C/1997 P2 (Spacewatch),
  • C/1999 U2 (SOHO),
  • C/2002 A3 (LINEAR),
  • C/2008 J4 (McNaught),
  • C/2012 C2 (Bruenjes),
  • C/2012 S1 (ISON),
  • C/2017 D3 (ATLAS).

Do we know just one, or 9 interstellar objects? Or between 1 and 9? Or more than 9? This is actually an important question, because that would constrain the number of detections to be expected in the future, and have implications for planetary formation in our Galaxy. And if these objects are interstellar ones, then we should try to investigate their physical properties (pretty difficult since they are very small and escaping, but we did it for ‘Oumuamua… maybe too late for the 8 other guys).

Anyway, more will be known in the years to come. More visitors from other systems will probably be discovered, and we will also know more on the motion of the stars passing by, thanks to the astrometric satellite Gaia. Stay tuned!

The study and its authors

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, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Comets

The Brazil Nut Effect on asteroids

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Hi there! You know these large nuts called Brazil nuts? Don’t worry, I will not make you think that they grow on asteroids. No they don’t. But when you put nuts in a pot, or in a glass, have you ever noticed that the biggest nuts remain at the top? That seems obvious, since we are used to that. But let us think about it… these are the heaviest nuts, and they don’t sink! WTF!!! And you have the same kind of effect on small bodies, asteroids, planetesimals, comets… I present you today a Japanese study about that, entitled Categorization of Brazil nut effect and its reverse under less-convective conditions for microgravity geology by Toshihiro Chujo, Osamu Mori, Jun’ichiro Kawaguchi, and Hajime Yano. This study has recently been published in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Outline

Brazil Nut and Reverse Brazil Nut effects
Numerical simulations
Lab experiments
From lab to reality
Triggering the Reverse Brazil Nut effect
The study and its authors

Brazil Nut and Reverse Brazil Nut effects

The idea is easy to figure out. If you have a pot full of different nuts, then the smallest ones will be naturally closer to the bottom, since they are small enough to fill the voids between the largest ones. For the same reason, if you fill a bucket first with stones and then with sand, the sand will naturally reach the bottom, flowing around the stones. Flowing is important here, since the sand pretty much behaves as a fluid. And of course, if you put the sand in the bucket first, and then the stones, the stones will naturally be closer to the top. Well, this is the Brazil Nut Effect.

OK, now let us make the story go one step further… You have an empty bucket, and you put sand inside… a third of it, or a half… this results as a flat structure. You put stones, which then cover the sand, lying on its surface… and you shake. You shake the bucket, many times… what happen? the sand is moving, and makes some room for the stones, or just some of them, which migrate deeper… if you shake enough, then some of them can even reach the bottom. This is the Reverse Brazil Nut Effect.

And the funny thing is that you can find this effect on planetary bodies! Wait, we may have a problem… when the body is large enough, then the material tends to melt, the heaviest one migrating to the core. So, the body has to be small enough for its interior being ruled by the Brazil Nut Effect, or its reversed version. If the body is small enough, then we are in conditions of microgravity. The authors give the examples of the Near-Earth Asteroid (433)Eros, its largest diameter being 34.4 km, the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is ten times smaller in length, and the asteroid (25143)Itokawa, its largest length being 535 meters. All of these bodies are in conditions of microgravity, and were visited by spacecraft, i.e. NEAR Shoemaker for Eros in 2001, Rosetta for Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, and Hayabusa for Itokawa in 2003. And all of these space missions have revealed pebbles and boulders at the surface, which motivated the study of planetary terrains in conditions of microgravity.

Eros seen by NEAR Shoemaker. © NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL
Eros seen by NEAR Shoemaker. © NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL

I mentioned the necessity to shake the bucket to give a chance to Reverse Brazil Nut Effect. How to shake these small bodies? With impact, of course. You have impactors everywhere in the Solar System, and small bodies do not need impactors to be large to be shaken enough. Moreover, this shaking could come from cometary activity, in case of a comet, which is true for Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The authors studied this process both with numerical simulations, and lab experiments.

Numerical simulations

The numerical simulations were conducted with a DEM code, for Discrete Element Modeling. It consisted to simulate the motion of particle which touch each others, or touch the wall of the container. These particles are spheres, and you have interactions when contact. These interactions are modeled with a mixture of spring (elastic interaction, i.e. without dissipation of energy) and dashpot (or damper, which induces a loss of energy at each contact). These two effects are mixed together in using the so-called Voigt rheology.

In every simulation, the authors had 10,224 small particles (the sand), and a large one, named intruder, which is the stone trying to make its way through the sand.

The simulations differed by

  • the density of the intruder (light as acryl, moderately dense as glass, or heavy as high-carbon chromium steel),
  • the frequency of the shaking, modeled as a sinusoidal oscillation over 50 cycles,
  • the restitution coefficient between the sand of the intruder. If it is null, then you dissipate all the energy when contact between the intruder and the sand, and when it is equal to unity then the interaction is purely elastic, i.e. you have no energy loss.

Allowing those parameters to vary will result in different outcomes of the simulations. This way, the influence of each of those parameters is being studied.

A drawback of some simulations is the computation time, since you need to simulate the behavior of each of the particles simultaneously. This is why the authors also explored another way: lab experiments.

Lab experiments

You just put sand in a container, you put an intruder, you shake, and you observe what is going on. Well, said that way, it seems to be easy. It is actually more complicated than that if you want to make proper job.

The recipient was an acryl cylinder, put on a vibration test machine. This machine was controlled by a device, which guaranteed the accuracy of the sinusoidal shaking, i.e. its amplitude, its frequency, and the total duration of the experiment. The intruder was initially put in the middle of the sand, i.e. half way between the bottom of the recipient and the surface of the sand. If it reached the bottom before 30,000 oscillation cycles, then the conclusion was RBNE, and if it raised from the surface the conclusion was BNE. Otherwise, these two effects were considered to be somehow roughly balanced.

But wait: the goal is to model the surface of small bodies, i.e. in conditions of microgravity. The authors did the experiment on Earth, so…? There are ways to reproduce microgravity conditions, like in a parabolic flight, or on board the International Space Station, but this was not the case here. The authors worked in a lab, submitted to our terrestrial gravity. The difficulty is to draw conclusions for the asteroids from Earth-based lab experiments.

At this point, the theory assists the experimentation. If you write down the equations ensuing from the physics (I don’t do it… feel free to do so if you want), these equations ruling the DEM code for instance, you will be able to manipulate them (yes you will) so as to make them depend on dimensionless parameters. For instance: your size is in meters (or in feet). It has the physical dimension of a length. But if you divide your size with the one of your neighbor, you should get something close to unity, but this will be a dimensionless quantity, as the ratio between your size and your neighbor’s. The size of your neighbor is now your reference (let him know, I am sure he would be delighted), and if your size if larger than 1, it means that you are taller than your neighbor (are you?). In the case of our Brazil Nut experiment, the equations give you a gravity, which you can divide by the local one, i.e. either the gravity of your lab, or the microgravity of an asteroid. The result of your simulation will be expressed with respect to this ratio, which you can then re-express with respect to the microgravity of your asteroid. So, all this is a matter of scale. These scaling laws are ubiquitous in lab experiments, and they permit to work in many other contexts.

Triggering the Reverse Brazil Nut effect

And here are the results:

  • The outcomes of the experiments match the ones of the numerical simulations.
  • The authors saw practically no granular convection, i.e. the sand initially at the bottom does not migrate to the top. This is here an analogy with fluid mechanics, in which water at the bottom can raise to the top, especially when it warms (warm water is less dense than cold one).
  • Densest intruders are the likeliest to migrate to the bottom.
  • The authors identified 3 distinct behaviors for the particles, depending on a dimensionless acceleration Γ.

These behaviors are:

  1. Slow Brazil Nut Effect,
  2. Fast BNE, for which the intruder requires less oscillation cycles to raise,
  3. Fluid motion, which may induce RBNE. This is favored by rapid oscillations of the shaking.

The study and its authors

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, Facebook, and (NEW) Instagram.

Asteroids: Main Belt, Comets

Breaking an asteroid

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Hi there! Asteroids, these small bodies in the Solar System, are fascinating by the diversity of their shapes. This is a consequence of their small sizes. Another consequence is their weakness, which itself helps to split some of them into different parts, sometimes creating binary objects, asteroids families… The study I present you today, Internal gravity, self-energy, and disruption of comets and asteroids, by Anthony R. Dobrovolskis and Donald G. Korycansky, proposes an accurate computation of the required energy to provoke this break-up, at any place of the asteroid, i.e. you are more efficient when you hit at a given location. This study has recently been accepted for publication in Icarus.

Outline

Shapes of asteroids
The energies involved
Kleopatra and Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Numerical modeling
Results
The study and its authors

Shapes of asteroids

Please allow me, in this context, to call asteroid a comet, a comet being a small body, i.e. like an asteroid, but with a cometary activity. The important thing is that the involved bodies are small enough.

Beyond a given size, i.e. a diameter of ~400 km, a planetary body is roughly spheroidal, i.e. it is an ellipsoid with it two equatorial axes almost equal and the polar one smaller, because of its rotation. For a tidally despun body, like the Moon, or a satellite of a giant planet, the shape is more triaxial, since the tidal (gravitational) action of the parent planet tends to elongate the equatorial plane. The same phenomenon affects Mercury.

However, for smaller bodies, the self-gravitation is not strong enough to make the body look more or less like a sphere. As a consequence, you can have almost any shape, some bodies are bilobate, some are contact binaries, i.e. two bodies which permanently touch together, some others are rubble piles, i.e. are weak aggregates of rocks, with many voids.

These configurations make these bodies likely to undergo or have undergone break-up. This can be quantified by the required energy to extract some material from the asteroid.

The energies involved

For that, an energy budget must be performed. The relevant energies to consider are:

  • The impact disruption energy: the minimum kinetic energy of an impactor, to shatter the asteroid and remove at least half of its mass,
  • The shattering energy: the minimum energy needed to shatter the asteroid into many small pieces. It is part of the impact disruption energy. This energy is roughly proportional to the mass of the asteroid. It represents the cohesion between the adjacent pieces.
  • The binding energy: this energy binds the pieces constituting the asteroid. In other words, once you have broken an asteroid (don’t try this at home!), you have to make sure the pieces will not re-aggregate… because of the binding energy. For that, you have to bring enough energy to disperse the fragments.
  • The self-gravitational energy: due to the mutual gravitational interaction between the blocks constituting the asteroids. Bodies smaller than 1 km are strength-dominated, i.e. they exist thanks to the cohesion between the blocks, which is the shatter energy. However, larger bodies are gravity-dominated.
  • The kinetic energy of rotation: the spin of these bodies tends to enlarge the equatorial section. In that sense, it assists the break-up process.

This study addresses bodies, which are far enough from the Sun. This is the reason why I do not mention its influences, i.e. the tides and the thermic effects, which could be relevant for Near-Earth Objects. In particular, the YORP effect is responsible for the fission of some of them. I do not mention the orbital kinetic energy of the asteroid either. Actually the orbital motion is part of the input energy brought by an impact, since the relative velocity of the impactor with respect to the target is relevant in this calculation.

I now focus on the two cases studied by the authors to illustrate their theory: the asteroid Kleopatra and the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

2 peculiar cases: Kleopatra and Churyumov-Gerasimenko

216 Kleopatra is a Main-Belt asteroid. Adaptive optics observations have shown that is is constituted of two masses bound by material, giving a ham-bone shaped. As such, it can be considered as a contact binary. It is probably a rubble pile. Interestingly, observations have also shown that Kleopatra has 2 small satellites, Alexhelios and Cleoselene, which were discovered in 2008.

Reconstruction of the shape of Kleopatra. © NASA
Reconstruction of the shape of Kleopatra. © NASA

However, 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a Jupiter-family comet, i.e. its aphelion is close to the orbit of Jupiter, while its perihelion is close to the one of the Earth. It has an orbital period of 6.45 years, and was the target of the Rosetta mission, which consisted of an orbiter and a lander, Philae. Rosetta orbited Churyumov-Gerasimenko between 2014 and 2016. The shape of this comet is sometimes described as rubber ducky, with two dominant masses, a torso and a head, bound together by some material, i.e. a neck.

Churyumov-Gerasimenko seen by Rosetta. © ESA
Churyumov-Gerasimenko seen by Rosetta. © ESA
216 Kleopatra 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Semimajor axis 2.794 AU 3.465 AU
Eccentricity 0.251 0.641
Inclination 13.11° 7.04°
Spin period 5.385 h 12.761 h
Mean radius 62 km 2.2 km
Magnitude 7.30 11.30
Discovery 1880 1969

The irregular shapes of these two bodies make them interesting targets for a study addressing the gravitation of any object. Let us see now how the authors addressed the problem.

Numerical modeling

Several models exist in the literature to address the gravity field of planetary bodies. The first approximation is to consider them as spheres, then you can refine in seeing them as triaxial ellipsoids. For highly irregular bodies you can try to model them as cuboids, and then as polyhedrons. Another way is to see them as duplexes, this allows to consider the inhomogeneities dues to the two masses constituting bilobate objects. The existence of previous studies allow a validation of the model proposed by the authors.

And their model is a finite-element numerical modeling. The idea is to split the surface of the asteroid into small triangular planar facets, which should be very close to the actual surface. The model is all the more accurate with many small facets, but this has the drawback of a longer computation time. The facets delimit the volume over which the equations are integrated, these equations giving the local self-gravitational and the impact disruption energies. The authors also introduce the energy rebate, which is a residual energy, due to the fact that you can remove material without removing half of it. This means that the impact disruption energy, as it is defined in the literature, is probably a too strong condition to have extrusion of material.
The useful physical quantities, which are the gravitational potential, the attraction, and the surface slope, are propagated all along the body thanks to a numerical scheme, which accuracy is characterized by an order. This order quantifies the numerical approximation which is made at each integration step. A higher order is more accurate, but is computationally more expensive.

Once the code has been run on test cases, the authors applied it on Kleopatra and Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for which the shape is pretty well known. They used meshes of 4,094 and 5,786 faces, respectively.

Results

The validation phase is successful. The authors show that with a 3rd order numerical scheme, they recover the results present in the literature for the test cases with an accuracy of ~0.1%, which is much better than the accuracy of the shape models for the real asteroids. Regarding Kleopatra and Churyumov-Gerasimenko, they get the gravity field at any location, showing in particular excesses of gravity at the two lobes.

Such a study is particularly interesting for further missions, which would determine the gravity field of asteroids, which would then be compared with the theoretical determination by this code. Other applications are envisaged, the authors mentioning asteroid mining.

The study and its authors

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.

And Merry Christmas!