The Nice Model and the Kuiper Belt
- Unfortunately, the Nice model is inconsistent with Levison & Morbidelli's push-out scenario because when Neptune circularizes the 1:2MMR is beyond the disk.
- However, it supplies us with another mechanism for doing the same thing:
- As Neptune scatters particles, they can be temporarily trapped in mean motion resonances.
- The resonances are wider if Neptune's eccentricity is large.
- Recall that Neptune goes through a high eccentricity phase as it settles into its current orbit.
- So, the resonances start out wide and decrease with time.
- Objects can be trapped during this time.
- Our simulations are idealized:
- Contain planets and massless test particles
- Uranus and Neptune are initially on eccentric orbits.
- They are analytically forced to migrate and their eccentricities slowly damp with time.
- We match the semi-major axes - eccentricity distribution fairly well.
- Although our eccentricities are a little too big.
- We match the inclination distribution fairly well.
- We also get a correlation between formation location and final inclination.
- This can explain the observed correlation between inclination and physical parameters:
- We find we capture 68 out of 60,000 particles in the main Kuiper belt.
- A 35 ME disk
a 0.04 ME Kuiper belt.
