The transparency of the Solar System to the Oort cloud comets

Astronomical Observatory of the A. Mickiewicz University, Słoneczna 36, 60-286 Poznań, Poland e-mail: dybol@amu.edu.pl

Received: 4 May 2004
Accepted: 7 August 2004

Abstract

In long-term Monte Carlo simulations of the dynamics of the Oort cloud planetary perturbations cannot be taken directly into account. To do this we propose a simple approximation: estimating the Solar System transparency coefficient P measuring the probability for a comet to be removed from the cloud by planetary perturbations during a single perihelion passage. We estimated the value of this coefficient from the observed and artificial cometary samples. We excluded nongravitational forces fom our calculations. We obtained for inner cloud comets and for the outer and most active part of the cloud. The dependency of P on the comet observability limit is also presented for various cometary samples.