Research Note

Probing the relation between the structure of initial proto-planetary disc and the Oort-cloud formation

¹ Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 84504 Bratislava, Slovakia
² Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, 05960 Tatranská Lomnica, Slovakia e-mail: [mjakubik;ne]@ta3.sk
³ Astronomical Observatory of the A. Mickiewicz University, Słoneczna 36, 60-286 Poznań, Poland e-mail: dybol@amu.edu.pl
⁴ Catania Astrophysical Observatory, via Santa Sofia 78, 95123 Catania, Italy e-mail: gle@astrct.oact.inaf.it

Received: 17 June 2009
Accepted: 19 October 2009

Abstract

Aims. The Oort cloud consists of cometary nuclei which were ejected from the once existing proto-planetary disc to large heliocentric distances by the giant planets. The process of the cloud formation depended on the initial structure and mass of the disc. Considering four models of an initial proto-planetary disc, we roughly probe this dependence.

Methods. We use the resultant data of our previous simulation of the Oort cloud formation for the first two Gyr. The considered disc models consist of a set of representative test particles. The new models are created subtracting a fraction of the particles from the model considered in our previous work, in a way to obtain the required heliocentric-distance distribution. Specifically, we focus on the situations in which a part of the small bodies in the disc is assumed to be already spent in the previous process of the giant planet formation. We omit the particles from an originally smooth profile in the regions adjacent to the planet orbits. With the reduced data, we construct the comet cloud characteristics we are interested in.

Results. We find that it is difficult to construct the proto-planetary disc if (i) the amount of heavy chemical elements in Jupiter and Saturn is as high as currently accepted (≈20 and ≈; respectively) and (ii) the total mass of the minimum-mass solar nebula is assumed to be lower than ≈. The behaviour of the Oort cloud formation does not crucially depend on the initial disc model. Some quantitative differences in its structure are obvious: since the cloud is known to be filled mainly by Uranus and Neptune, the efficiency of its formation is higher if the initial amount of particles in the Uranus-Neptune region is relatively higher. The efficiency is also higher in the gapped-disc models because a less amount of particles experience a very close encounter with a planet resulting in their ejection into the interstellar space.