Debris from terrestrial planet formation: the Moon-forming collision

TL;DR

This study models the debris evolution from the Moon-forming impact, showing how debris disperses and depletes over time, and estimates the likelihood of detecting such debris around other stars, informing terrestrial planet formation rates.

Contribution

It provides a detailed dynamical and collisional evolution model of impact debris, linking debris detectability to planet formation processes and constraining the frequency of terrestrial planet formation.

Findings

Debris disperses from a clump to an axisymmetric ring within 1 Myr.

Approximately 20% of debris accretes onto Earth within 10 Myr.

Detectable dust levels suggest less than 10% of stars form terrestrial planets.

Abstract

We study the evolution of debris created in the giant impacts expected during the final stages of terrestrial planet formation. The starting point is the debris created in a simulation of the Moon-forming impact. The dynamical evolution is followed for 10 Myr including the effects of Earth, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. The spatial distribution evolves from a clump in the first few months to an asymmetric ring for the first 10 kyr and finally becoming an axisymmetric ring by about 1 Myr after the impact. By 10 Myr after the impact 20% of the particles have been accreted onto Earth and 17% onto Venus, with 8% ejected by Jupiter and other bodies playing minor roles. However, the fate of the debris also depends strongly on how fast it is collisionally depleted, which depends on the poorly constrained size distribution of the impact debris. Assuming that the debris is made up of 30% by mass mm-cm-sized vapour condensates and 70% boulders up to 500 km, we find that the condensates deplete rapidly on ~1000 yr timescales, whereas the boulders deplete predominantly dynamically. By considering the luminosity of dust produced in collisions within the boulder-debris distribution we find that the Moon-forming impact would have been readily detectable around other stars in Spitzer 24 micron surveys for around 25 Myr after the impact, with levels of emission comparable to many known hot dust systems. The vapour condensates meanwhile produce a short-lived, optically thick, spike of emission. We use these surveys to make an estimate of the fraction of stars that form terrestrial planets, F_TPF. Since current terrestrial planet formation models invoke multiple giant impacts, the low fraction of 10-100 Myr stars found to have warm (~150 K) dust implies that F_TPF ~<10%.