Abstract
The trans-Neptunian belt has been subject to a strong depletion that has reduced its primordial population by a factor of one hundred over the solar system’s age. One by-product of such a depletion process is the existence of a scattered disk population in transit from the belt to other places, such as the Jupiter zone, the Oort cloud or interstellar space. We have integrated the orbits of the scattered disk objects (SDOs) so far discovered by 2500 Myr to study their dynamical time scales and the probability of falling in each of the end states mentioned above, paying special attention to their contribution to the Oort cloud. We found that their dynamical half-time is close to 2.5 Gyr and that about one third of the SDOs end up in the Oort cloud.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Duncan, M. J. and Levison, H. F.: 1997, ‘A Disk of Scattered Icy Objects and the Origin of Jupiter-family Comets’, Science 276, 1670–1672.
Duncan, M., Quinn, T., and Tremaine, S.: 1988, ‘The Prgin of Short-period Comets’, Astrophys. J. Lett. 328, L69 - L73.
Fernandez, J. A.: 1980, ‘On the Existence of a Comet Belt Beyond Neptune’, Mon. Not. R. Asti: Soc. 192, 481–491.
Fernandez, J. A., Gallardo, T., and Brunini, A.: 2002, ‘Are There Many Inactive Jupiter Family Comets Among the Near-Earth Asteroid Population?’, Icarus 159, 358–368.
Kowal, C.: 1989, ‘A Solar System Survey’, Icarus 77, 118–123.
Larsen, J. A., Gleason, A. E., Danzi, N. M., Descour, A. S., McMillan, R. S., Gehrels, T., Jedicke, R., Montani, J. L., and Scotti, J. V.: 2001, ‘The Spacewatch Wide-area Survey for Bright Centaurs and Trans-Neptunian Objects’, Astron. J. 121, 562–579.
Luu, J., Marsden, B. G., Jewitt, D., Trujillo, C. A., Hergenrother, C. W., Chen, J., and Offutt, W. B.: 1997, ‘A New Dynamical Class of Object in the Outer Solar System’, Nature 387, 573–575.
Trujillo, C. A., Jewitt, D. C., and Luu, J. X.: 2001, ‘Properties of the Trans-Neptunian Belt: Statistics from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Survey’, Astron. J. 122, 457–473.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fernández, J.A., Gallardo, T., Brunini, A. (2004). The Scattered Disk Population and the Oort Cloud. In: Davies, J.K., Barrera, L.H. (eds) The First Decadal Review of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3321-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3321-2_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6501-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-3321-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive