Published January 28, 2005
| Supplemental Material
Journal Article
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A Giant Impact Origin of Pluto-Charon
- Creators
- Canup, Robin
Abstract
Pluto and its moon, Charon, are the most prominent members of the Kuiper belt, and their existence holds clues to outer solar system formation processes. Here, hydrodynamic simulations are used to demonstrate that the formation of Pluto-Charon by means of a large collision is quite plausible. I show that such an impact probably produced an intact Charon, although it is possible that a disk of material orbited Pluto from which Charon later accumulated. These findings suggest that collisions between 1000-kilometer-class objects occurred in the early inner Kuiper belt.
Additional Information
Copyright 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved. Received for publication 27 October 2004. Accepted for publication 29 December 2004. This research was supported by the NSF under grant no. AST0307933. J. Melosh and B. Pierazzo are gratefully acknowledged for providing the M-ANEOS equation of state and related material constants. This paper has benefited from previous work and discussions with E. Asphaug, W. Ward, A. Stern, R. Mihran, B. McKinnon, S. Kenyon, and H. Levison and from two anonymous and helpful reviews. A. Stern, L. Young, C. Olkin, and B. Bottke provided helpful comments on the manuscript, and Southwest Research Institute provided the computational resources.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 51983
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20141119-161740181
- AST0307933
- NSF
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2014-11-21Created from EPrint's datestamp field
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field