Water delivery to dry protoplanets by hit-and-run collisions
astro-ph.EP
/ Authors
/ Abstract
Final water inventories of newly formed terrestrial planets are shaped by their collision history. A setting where volatiles are transported from beyond the snowline to habitable-zone planets suggests collisions of very dry with water-rich bodies. By means of smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations we study water delivery in scenarios where a dry target is hit by a water-rich projectile, focusing on hit-and-run encounters with two large surviving bodies, which probably comprise about half of all similar-sized collisions.