The Scattered Disk as a Source of Halley-Type Comets


Conclusions:
  1. There is a dynamical mechanism that can create HTCs from the scattered disk.
    • 'Scattered disk' because planetary perturbations are always important
      (i.e. objects never have large q).

  2. It reproduces the semi-major axis and inclination distributions of the observed comets.

  3. There should be weak comet showers every 120 Myr.

  4. For this to work, the scattered disk must contain ~5 billion comet-sized objects.
    • 10X larger than Duncan & Levison's estimate from the Jupiter-family comets.
      • However, both numbers are badly known.
    • Consistent with observational evidence of Trujillo et al. (2000).


This talk can be found at www.boulder.swri.edu/~hal/talks.html

We are grateful to NASA's Origins and PG&G programs for support.