David Minton, Purdue University
When
Refreshments served at 3:00 pm in the 3rd Floor Atrium
TAP Planet Formation Initiative Lecture/Colloquium
David Minton, Purdue University
Title: Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Modeling Collisional Fragmentation During Planet and Satellite Formation
Abstract: It has long been recognized that collisional fragmentation must play an important role during the accretion of planets and satellites. However, modeling realistic collisional evolution is numerically challenging. Here I review efforts to model collisional evolution in n-body integrators used in planetary science, including a new model developed within my research group called Fraggle. Fraggle is part of the Swiftest software package, which is an updated version of the Swift n-body integrator package that includes a number of improvements, including improved paralellization and a Python-based front-end.
I will show how collisional fragmentation plays a role in the late-stage of terrestrial planet formation and how cratered surfaces can provide important constraints on the dynamical evolution of early planetesimals and collisional fragments. I will also discuss the origin and evolution of the Moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. I will describe a novel hypothesis for a history of Phobos that involves an ongoing ring/moon cycle of destruction and rebirth. I will demonstrate how oft-neglected Deimos provides constraints on the history of the martian system as a whole, and the role that the "Sesquinary Catastrophe" may have played in its history.
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