[Baps] Zoe Leinhardt on Haumea, CfA talk Mon May 3 at noon

[Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay]

Harvard-CfA Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences (SSP) Seminar

*The Formation of the Haumea Collisional Family

Dr. Zoe Leinhardt*
U. Cambridge

Monday May 3 at Noon
Pratt conference room, PG-04, 60 Garden Street
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/ssp/events.html

Abstract
Haumea, a rapidly rotating elongated dwarf planet (∼1500 km in diameter),
has two satellites and is associated with a “family” of several smaller
Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) in similar orbits. All members of the Haumea
system share a water ice spectral feature that is distinct from all other
KBOs. The relative velocities between the Haumea family members are too
small to have formed by catastrophic disruption of a large precursor body,
which is the process that formed families around much smaller asteroids in
themain belt. Here, we show that all of the unusual characteristics of the
Haumea system are explained by a novel type of giant collision: a graze and
merge impact between two comparably sized bodies. The grazing encounter
imparted the high angular momentum that spun off fragments from the icy
crust of the elongated merged body. The fragments became satellites and
family members. Giant collision outcomes are extremely sensitive to the
impact parameters. Compared to the main belt, the largest bodies in the
Kuiper Belt are more massive and experience slower velocity collisions;
hence, outcomes of giant collisions are dramatically different between the
inner and outer solar system. The dwarf planets in theKuiper Belt record an
unexpectedly large number of giant collisions, requiring a special dynamical
event at the end of solar system formation.

Link to paper: http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/714/2/1789
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/baps/attachments/20100428/001670af/attachment.htm