The Creation of Haumea's Collisional Family

Abstract

Recently, the first collisional family was discovered in the Kuiper belt. The parent body of this family, Haumea, is one of the largest objects in the Kuiper belt and is orbited by two satellites. It has been proposed that the Haumea family was created from dispersed fragments that resulted from a giant impact. This proposed origin of the Haumea family is however in conflict with the observed velocity dispersion between the family members (\sim 140 m/s) which is significantly less than the escape velocity from Haumea's surface (\sim 900 m/s). In this paper we propose a different formation scenario for Haumea's collisional family. In our scenario the family members are ejected while in orbit around Haumea. This scenario, therefore, gives naturally rise to a lower velocity dispersion among the family members than expected from direct ejection from Haumea's surface. In our scenario Haumea's giant impact forms a single moon that tidally evolves outward until it suffers a destructive collision from which the family is created. We show that this formation scenario yields a velocity dispersion of \sim 190m/s among the family members which is in good agreement with the observations. The probability for Haumea's initial giant impact in todays Kuiper belt is less than 10^{-3}. In our scenario, however, Haumea's giant impact can occur before the excitation of the Kuiper belt and the ejection of the family members afterwards. This has the advantage that one can preserve the dynamical coherence of the family and explain Haumea's original giant impact, which is several orders of magnitude more likely to have occurred in the primordial dynamically cold Kuiper belt compared to the dynamically excited Kuiper belt today. Abridged