Crater-diameter distribution on Comets 9P and 81P and potential meteoroid streams crossing their orbits

摘要

We attempt to answer two questions concerning the impacts of stream meteoroids on the nuclei of Comets 9P/Tempel 1 and 81P/Wild 2: firstly, how many streams cross the orbits of both comets and, secondly, what is the index of the differential mass distribution of impactors, s, when we assume that a prevailing number of the craters on the surfaces of cometary nuclei were created by stream meteoroids? We found that 110 and 129 potential streams originating from comets likely cross the orbits of 9P and 81P, respectively (and 103 potential streams cross the orbit of 1P/Halley, for comparison). If we consider the more compact streams originating from asteroids, the 9P and 81P pass through such streams 15 664 and 65 368 times. Neither these large numbers of passages imply, however, enough large impactors to excavate the whole observed variety of craters on studied comets. For all craters on 9P and 81P, s = 2.09 +/- 0.01 and s = 2.25 +/- 0.03, respectively. The craters on 81P seem to be, however, excavated by the impactors from four discernible sources. For two numerous enough sources we find s = 5.6 +/- 0.2 and s = 5.2 +/- 0.5. The difference between the indices for the set of all craters and the sets of their partial groups obviously implies an unknown cosmogonic consequence. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.