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Session 5 - Solar System Objects.
Display session, Monday, June 09
South Main Hall,
In a recent work (Ida, Canup and Stewart, submitted to Nature) we performed N-body simulations of accretion in a protolunar disk generated by a giant-impact with the Earth. Previous statistical modeling of lunar accretion by Canup and Esposito (1996) showed that a single, lunar-sized Moon was most easily produced from disks with a lunar mass of material initially outside the Roche limit. Such disks seem to be associated with impacts with about twice the angular momentum of the current Earth/Moon system (e.g. Cameron 1997). In our recent work, we have identified a relationship between the initial disk mass and angular momentum and the mass of the Moon which accretes from the disk. We again find that high angular momentum disks are the most likely to yield a lunar-sized body, although it remains unclear how the excess angular momentum could then be removed from the Earth/Moon system.
