Atmosphere Loss by Aerial Bursts

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytic model to evaluate atmospheric mass loss caused by aerial bursts from impactors, highlighting conditions where aerial bursts significantly contribute to atmospheric erosion, especially for Neptune-like planets.

Contribution

It provides a simple analytic framework to quantify atmospheric loss from aerial bursts and compares effects across different atmospheric models and planetary conditions.

Findings

Aerial bursts significantly contribute to atmospheric loss when impactor sizes exceed a certain threshold.

Atmospheric loss from aerial bursts is larger in adiabatic atmospheres than in isothermal ones.

For Neptune-like planets, aerial bursts can cause atmospheric loss comparable to ground explosions.

Abstract

We present a simple analytic description of atmospheric mass loss by aerial bursts and demonstrate that mass loss from aerial bursts becomes significant when the maximum impactor size that leads to an aerial burst rather than a ground explosion, $r_o$, is larger than the minimum impactor size needed to achieve atmospheric loss, $r_{min}$. For vertical trajectories, which give the most stringent limit, this condition is approximately satisfied when $\rho_o/\rho_i \gtrsim 0.4 v_e/v_\infty$, which implies atmospheric densities need to be comparable to impactor densities for impactor velocities that are a few times the escape velocity of the planet. The range of impactor radii resulting in aerial burst-induced mass loss, $r_o-r_{min}$, increases with the ratio of the atmosphere to the impactor density and with the trajectory angle of the impactor. The range of impactor radii that result in aerial burst-induced mass loss and the atmospheric mass lost is larger in adiabatic atmospheres than isothermal atmospheres of equivalent total mass, scale height, and atmospheric surface density. Our results imply that aerial bursts are not expected to significantly contribute to the atmospheric mass-loss history of Earth, but are expected to play an important role for planets and exoplanets similar to Neptune with significant atmospheres. For Neptune-like atmospheres, the atmospheric mass ejected per impactor mass by aerial bursts is comparable to that lost by ground explosions, which implies that, for impactors following a Dohnanyi size distribution, overall loss by aerial busts is expected to exceed that by ground explosions by a factor of $(r_{ground}/r_{aerial})^{0.5}$.