MOND orbits in the Oort cloud

TL;DR

This study numerically explores how MOND modifies the orbits of objects in the Oort cloud, revealing significant distortions influenced by initial conditions and the external galactic field, with implications for understanding the cloud's structure.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed numerical analysis of Oort cloud orbits under MOND, including the effects of the External Field Effect and different interpolating functions.

Findings

MOND causes highly distorted and eccentric orbits compared to Newtonian predictions.

Orbit shapes in MOND depend strongly on initial conditions and can be significantly shrunk or extended.

The results suggest possible impacts on the understanding of the Oort cloud's composition and evolution.

Abstract

We numerically investigate the features of typical orbits occurring in the Oort cloud (r\approx 50-150 kAU) in the low-acceleration regime of the MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). We take into account the so-called External Field Effect (EFE) because the solar system is embedded in the Milky Way. In the framework of MOND this does matter since the gravitational acceleration of Galactic origin felt by the solar system is of the same order of magnitude of the characteristic MOND acceleration scale A_0\approx 10^-10 m s^-2. We use three different forms of the MOND interpolating function \mu(x) and two different values for the Galactic field at the Sun's location. We find that MOND produces highly distorted trajectories with respect to the Newtonian case, especially for very eccentric orbits. It turns out that the shape of the MOND orbits strongly depend on the initial conditions. For particular initial state vectors, the MOND paths in the ecliptic plane get shrunk extending over much smaller spatial regions than in the Newtonian case, and experience high frequency variations over one Keplerian orbital period. Ecliptic orbits with different initial conditions and nearly polar orbits are quite different getting distorted as well, but they occupy more extended spatial regions. This facts may have consequences on the composition and the dynamical history of the Oort cloud which are difficult to predict.