Predicting the outcome of collisions between planets: new data, scaling, and implication

Collisions between planetary bodies have played a crucial role in the solar system's formation and subsequent evolution. I will present data from ~ 200 collision simulations used to derive a simple scaling law for the threshold for disruption of the gravitational binding energy of the two-body system at the moment of impact.

Speaker: Naor Movshovitz, UC Santa Cruz

Room: 242