Merging Criteria for Giant Impacts of Protoplanets

TL;DR

This study investigates the conditions under which protoplanet collisions result in merging or hit-and-run outcomes, providing a new formula to predict collision results that challenge the assumption of perfect accretion in planet formation models.

Contribution

The paper introduces a simple formula for the critical impact velocity determining merging versus hit-and-run collisions, based on extensive SPH simulations, advancing understanding of protoplanet collision outcomes.

Findings

40% of giant impacts are non-merging events.

Critical impact velocity depends on mass ratio and impact angle.

Derived formula applied to previous N-body simulations.

Abstract

At the final stage of terrestrial planet formation, known as the giant impact stage, a few tens of Mars-sized protoplanets collide with one another to form terrestrial planets. Almost all previous studies on the orbital and accretional evolution of protoplanets in this stage have been based on the assumption of perfect accretion, where two colliding protoplanets always merge. However, recent impact simulations have shown that collisions among protoplanets are not always merging events, that is, two colliding protoplanets sometimes move apart after the collision (hit-and-run collision). As a first step towards studying the effects of such imperfect accretion of protoplanets on terrestrial planet formation, we investigated the merging criteria for collisions of rocky protoplanets. Using the smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) method, we performed more than 1000 simulations of giant impacts with various parameter sets, such as the mass ratio of protoplanets, $\gamma$, the total mass of two protoplanets, $M_{\rm T}$, the impact angle, $\theta$, and the impact velocity, $v_{\rm imp}$. We investigated the critical impact velocity, $v_{\rm cr}$, at the transition between merging and hit-and-run collisions. We found that the normalized critical impact velocity, $v_{\rm cr}/v_{\rm esc}$, depends on $\gamma$ and $\theta$, but does not depend on $M_{\rm T}$, where $v_{\rm esc}$ is the two-body escape velocity. We derived a simple formula for $v_{\rm cr}/v_{\rm esc}$ as a function of $\gamma$ and $\theta$, and applied it to the giant impact events obtained by \textit{N}-body calculations in the previous studies. We found that 40% of these events should not be merging events.