Three-Body Affairs in the Outer Solar System

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dc.creatorFunato, Yoko
dc.creatorMakino, Junichiro
dc.creatorHut, Piet
dc.creatorKokubo, Eiichiro
dc.creatorKinoshita, Daisuke
dc.date2005-12-03
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T06:49:00Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T06:49:00Z
dc.descriptionRecent observations (Burnes2002,Veillet2002,Margot2002a) have revealed an unexpectedly high binary fraction among the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) that populate the Kuiper Belt. The TNO binaries are strikingly different from asteroid binaries in four respects (Veillet2002): their frequency is an order of magnitude larger, the mass ratio of their components is closer to unity, and their orbits are wider and highly eccentric. Two explanations have been proposed for their formation, one assuming large numbers of massive bodies (Weidenschilling2002), and one assuming large numbers of light bodies (Goldreich2002). We argue that both assumptions are unwarranted, and we show how TNO binaries can be produced from a modest number of intermediate-mass bodies of the type predicted by the gravitational instability theory for the formation of planetesimals (Goldreich and Ward1973). We start with a TNO binary population similar to the asteroid binary population, but subsequently modified by three-body exchange reactions, a process that is far more efficient in the Kuiper belt, because of the much smaller tidal perturbations by the Sun. Our mechanism can naturally account for all four characteristics that distinguish TNO binaries from main-belt asteroid binaries.
dc.descriptionPublished in 2003 in the proceedings of the 35th Symposium on Celestial Mechanics. 8 pages
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512075
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512075
dc.identifierIn Proceedings of the 35th Symposium on Celestial Mechanics, eds. E. Kokubo, H. Arakida, and T. Yamamoto. Tokyo, Japan, 2003
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/104176
dc.subjectAstrophysics
dc.titleThree-Body Affairs in the Outer Solar System
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