Forming Mercury from excited initial conditions
The Astrophysical Journal(2024)
摘要
Mercury is notoriously difficult to form in solar system simulations, due to
its small mass and iron-rich composition. Smooth particle hydrodynamics
simulations of collisions have found that a Mercury-like body could be formed
by one or multiple giant impacts, but due to the chaotic nature of collisions
it is difficult to create a scenario where such impacts will take place. Recent
work has found more success forming Mercury analogues by adding additional
embryos near Mercury's orbit. In this work, we aim to form Mercury by
simulating the formation of the solar system in the presence of the giant
planets Jupiter and Saturn. We test out the effect of an inner disk of embryos
added on to the commonly-used narrow annulus of initial material. We form
Mercury analogues with core-mass fractions (CMF) > 0.4 in ∼ 10% of our
simulations, and twice that number of Mercury analogues form during the
formation process, but are unstable and do not last to the end of the
simulations. Mercury analogues form at similar rates for both disks with and
without an inner component, and most of our Mercury analogues have lower CMF
than that of Mercury, ∼ 0.7, due to significant accretion of debris
material. We suggest that a more in-depth understanding of the fraction of
debris mass that is lost to collisional grinding is necessary to understand
Mercury's formation, or some additional mechanism is required to stop this
debris from accreting.
更多查看译文
关键词
Mercury (planet),Solar system formation,Collisional processes,Solar system terrestrial planets
AI 理解论文
溯源树
样例
生成溯源树,研究论文发展脉络
Chat Paper
正在生成论文摘要