Can a jumping-Jupiter trigger the Moon's formation impact?
Sandro R. DeSouza, Fernando Roig, David Nesvorn\'y

TL;DR
This study explores whether the early dynamical instability of giant planets, specifically the jumping Jupiter scenario, could have triggered the Moon's formation impact, linking planetary migration to lunar origin.
Contribution
It demonstrates that giant planet migrations can excite terrestrial planet orbits, leading to Moon-forming impacts with realistic timing and conditions, supporting early instability hypotheses.
Findings
Approximately 10% of simulations produce Moon-forming impacts.
Most impacts occur in the hit-and-run regime, with some in partial accretion.
Delay of over 20 My between instability and impact aligns with cosmochemical data.
Abstract
We investigate the possibility that the Moon's formation impact was triggered by an early dynamical instability of the giant planets. We consider the well-studied "jumping Jupiter" hypothesis for the solar system's instability, where Jupiter and Saturn's semi-major axes evolve in step-wise manner from their primordially compact architecture to their present locations. Moreover, we test multiple different configurations for the primordial system of terrestrial planets and the Moon-forming projectile, with particular focus on the almost equal masses impact. We find that the instability/migration of the giant planets excites the orbits of the terrestrial planets through dynamical perturbations, thus allowing collisions between them. About 10% of the simulations lead to a collision with the proto-Earth which resulted in a final configuration of the terrestrial system that reproduces, to…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
