arXiv subjects

Zoë M. Leinhardt

Publications and source records attributed to Zoë M. Leinhardt.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Blinding Lights: Simulation-Based Evidence for Terrestrial Giant Impacts as Astronomically Observable Events

Giant impacts (collisions between planet-sized bodies) are violent events that fundamentally alter the properties of planets and the structure of planetary systems. Observations of these events provide important constraints on the role of giant impacts in the formation of planetary systems. However, relating such observations to the specifics of the impact responsible is challenging, since numerical simulations struggle to resolve the expected extreme low densities of observable material at the edge of ongoing impact structures. In particular, lower limits on density are often enforced in SPH codes for computational efficiency. Here, we present a method of post-processing output from smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of giant impacts, that emulates realistic physical properties in multi-phase and multi-material collisions, in order to better understand these low-density outer regions. We apply our novel post-processing pipeline to determine the direct thermal emission and potential observational signatures of giant impacts, and obtain consistent photic surface geometries for an example impact simulated for a range of resolutions and code parameters. We find that during the first days after this terrestrial giant impact event, the emission from hot, unbound ejecta can be comparable in temperature and luminosity to that of an M-Dwarf star, and as such can be astronomically observable. Our work begins to bridge the gap between observations and theoretical models, and could allow high cadence, large-sky surveys, such as that to be carried out by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, to place constraints on the frequency and properties of giant impacts in our local neighbourhood.

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arXiv2026

Giant impacts preferentially remove low-mass atmospheres: a generalised scaling law for impact-driven atmospheric loss

Impact-driven atmospheric loss plays a key role in shaping the diversity of planetary atmospheres. However, existing prescriptions for calculating loss from a given impact neglect the critical role of atmospheric mass on loss, and thus often severely miscalculate the extent of loss. Using 3D smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations, we quantify atmospheric loss during giant impacts onto planets with 1-20% mass fraction atmospheres and show that less massive (lower-pressure) atmospheres are significantly easier to remove. We derive a new scaling law for atmospheric loss that includes the effects of atmospheric mass and is applicable to collisions between volatile-poor planetary embryos through to super-Earths and sub-Neptunes. Applying our scaling law to $N$-body simulations of solar system formation, we show that including the coupling between atmospheric mass and loss efficiency results in significantly more atmosphere removal. Substantial atmospheric loss events are common for smaller planets ($\lesssim$0.6 M$_{\oplus}$), whilst even roughly Earth mass bodies lose 30-100% of their atmospheres through multiple impacts. We also show that atmospheric loss during the Moon-forming impact strongly depends on both the pre-impact atmospheric mass and impact style. For a representative $\sim$100 bar pre-impact atmosphere, Earth could have lost between 20-80% of its atmosphere. In any system that undergoes a phase of giant impacts, the atmospheres of its host planets will be unavoidably shaped by the stochasticity of impacts. Our new scaling law can be readily incorporated into models of planet formation and system-wide evolution, offering new insights into the origins of planetary diversity.

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arXiv2026

Growing Planets Produce Extreme Dust Signatures

Collisions between planetary bodies are essential to the assembly of rocky planets like the Earth, but they are extremely difficult to observe. We therefore rely on indirect signatures of planetary impacts such as extreme debris disks - bright infrared excesses around other stars. Extreme debris disks are thought to be the result of energetic collisions that ejected large amounts of vaporized rock which rapidly condensed into mm- or cm-sized dust. However, previously there has been no clear way to relate the observed mass of dust to the collision that produced it. Here, we show that the colliding bodies required are orders of magnitude more massive than the mass of dust observed. We find that more massive extreme debris disks require proportionally larger colliding bodies. As a consequence, the most massive observed extreme debris disks require collisions of Mars- to Earth-mass bodies. Extreme debris disks thus reveal the ongoing formation of rocky planets comparable in size to the rocky planets of our own solar system.

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arXiv2025

A "New Hope" for Moon Formation: Presenting a Multiple Impact Pathway

The leading hypothesis for the origin of the Moon, that of a single giant impact, faces significant challenges. These include either the need for an impactor with a near-identical composition to Earth or an extremely high-mass or high-energy impact to achieve near-complete material mixing. In this paper we explore an alternative, the "multiple impact hypothesis", which relaxes the compositional constraints on both the target and projectile, and allows for the consideration of more probable, less extreme impacts that steadily grow the Earth and Moon to their current size over several impact events. Using the hydrodynamical code SWIFT, we simulate "chains" of impacts and follow the growth of a moon around a planet analogous to our own. Our results demonstrate that chains of three or more impacts can produce systems comparable to the Earth-Moon system whilst achieving higher compositional similarities than the canonical giant impact scenario. This presents the multiple impact hypothesis as a promising alternative to the single large impact scenario for the origin of the Moon.

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arXiv2025

Asteroids fail to retain cometary impact signatures

A bombardment of comets is thought to have occurred in the inner solar system as a result of a dynamical instability among the giant planets after gas disk dispersal. Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the main asteroid belt, likely differentiated before gas disk dispersal, implying its crust witnessed the cometary bombardment. The composition of HED meteorites, which represent fragments of Vesta's crust, could therefore have been altered by cometary impacts. Here we combine noble gas mass spectrometry measurements, N-body simulations, collision rate calculations, and impact simulations to estimate the cometary contribution to Vesta. While our dynamical simulations indicate that Vesta likely underwent a significant number of collisions with large comets, we find no xenon cometary signature in HED meteorites. This apparent contradiction arises due to the fact that cometary impacts were at high speeds and Vesta's weak gravitational attraction made it incapable of retaining cometary material. Smaller asteroids are even less likely to retain such material. Therefore, if a cometary xenon signature is ever detected in an asteroid belt object, it must have been acquired during formation, within the same source region as comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and have been implanted later into the asteroid belt.

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arXiv2025

Atmospheric loss during giant impacts: mechanisms and scaling of near- and far-field loss

The primary epoch of planetary accretion concludes with giant impacts - highly energetic collisions between proto-planets that can play a key role in shaping a planet's inventory of volatile elements. Previous work has shown that single giant impacts have the potential to eject a significant amount of a planet's atmosphere but that the efficiency of atmospheric loss depends strongly on the impact parameters and atmospheric properties. Fully quantifying the role of giant impacts in planetary volatile evolution requires a more complete understanding of the mechanisms driving loss during impacts. Here, we use a suite of 3D smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to show that loss in giant impacts is controlled primarily by ejecta plumes near the impact site and breakout of the impact shock in the far field, with the efficiency of the latter well approximated by 1D ground-kick calculations. The relative contributions of each mechanism to loss changes drastically with varying impact parameters. By considering the near and far field separately, we present a scaling law that precisely approximates (to within an average of $\sim$3%) loss from 0.35 to 5.0 Earth mass planets with 5% mass fraction H$_2$-He atmospheres for any combination of impactor mass, impact velocity, and angle. Finally, we apply our scaling law to the results of $N$-body simulations for different solar system formation scenarios. We find that while individual impacts rarely cause significant loss ($>$10%) from roughly Earth-mass planets with such massive primary atmospheres, the cumulative effect of multiple impacts can be substantial (40-70% loss).

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arXiv2024

Formation of super-Mercuries via giant impacts

During the final stage of planetary formation, different formation pathways of planetary embryos could significantly influence the observed variations in planetary densities. Of the approximately 5,000 exoplanets identified to date, a notable subset exhibit core fractions reminiscent of Mercury, potentially a consequence of high-velocity giant impacts. In order to better understand the influence of such collisions on planetary formation and compositional evolution, we conducted an extensive set of smoothed particle hydrodynamics giant impact simulations between two-layered rocky bodies. These simulations spanned a broad range of impact velocities from one to eleven times the mutual escape velocity. We derived novel scaling laws that estimate the mass and core mass fraction of the largest post-collision remnants. Our findings indicate that the extent of core vaporization markedly influences mantle stripping efficiency at low impact angles. We delineate the distinct roles played by two mechanisms -- kinetic momentum transfer and vaporization-induced ejection -- in mantle stripping. Our research suggests that collisional outcomes for multi-layered planets are more complex than those for undifferentiated planetesimal impacts. Thus, a single universal law may not encompass all collision processes. We found a significant decrease in the mantle stripping efficiency as the impact angle increases. To form a 5 M$_{\oplus}$ super-Mercury at $45^{\circ}$, an impact velocity over 200 km s$^{-1}$ is required. This poses a challenge to the formation of super-Mercuries through a single giant impact, implying that their formation would either favor relatively low-angle single impacts or multiple

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arXiv2023

Post-Giant Impact Planetesimals Sustaining Extreme Debris Disks

Extreme debris disks can show short term behaviour through the evolution and clearing of small grains produced in giant impacts, and potentially a longer period of variability caused by a planetesimal population formed from giant impact ejecta. In this paper, we present results of numerical simulations to explain how a planetesimal populated disk can supply an observed extreme debris disk with small grains. We simulated a sample of giant impacts from which we form a planetesimal population. We then use the $N$-body code {\sc Rebound} to evolve the planetesimals spatially and collisionally. We adopt a simplistic collision criteria in which we define destructive collisions to be between planetesimals with a mutual impact velocity that exceeds two times the catastrophic disruption threshold, $V^*$. We find that for some configurations, a planetesimal populated disk can produce a substantial amount of dust to sustain an observable disk. The semi-major axis at which the giant impact occurs changes the mass added to the observed disk substantially while the orientation of the impact has less of an effect. We determine how the collision rate at the collision point changes over time and show that changes in semi-major axis and orientation only change the initial collision rate of the disk. Collision rates across all disks evolve at a similar rate.

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arXiv2019

A giant impact as the likely origin of different twins in the Kepler-107 exoplanet system

Measures of exoplanet bulk densities indicate that small exoplanets with radius less than 3 Earth radii ($R_\oplus$) range from low-density sub-Neptunes containing volatile elements to higher density rocky planets with Earth-like or iron-rich (Mercury-like) compositions. Such astonishing diversity in observed small exoplanet compositions may be the product of different initial conditions of the planet-formation process and/or different evolutionary paths that altered the planetary properties after formation. Planet evolution may be especially affected by either photoevaporative mass loss induced by high stellar X-ray and extreme ultraviolet (XUV) flux or giant impacts. Although there is some evidence for the former, there are no unambiguous findings so far about the occurrence of giant impacts in an exoplanet system. Here, we characterize the two innermost planets of the compact and near-resonant system Kepler-107. We show that they have nearly identical radii (about $1.5-1.6~R_\oplus$), but the outer planet Kepler-107c is more than twice as dense (about $12.6~\rm g\,cm^{-3}$) as the innermost Kepler-107b (about $5.3~\rm g\,cm^{-3}$). In consequence, Kepler-107c must have a larger iron core fraction than Kepler-107b. This imbalance cannot be explained by the stellar XUV irradiation, which would conversely make the more-irradiated and less-massive planet Kepler-107b denser than Kepler-107c. Instead, the dissimilar densities are consistent with a giant impact event on Kepler-107c that would have stripped off part of its silicate mantle. This hypothesis is supported by theoretical predictions from collisional mantle stripping, which match the mass and radius of Kepler-107c.

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arXiv2017

Collisional stripping of planetary crusts

Geochemical studies of planetary accretion and evolution have invoked various degrees of collisional erosion to explain differences in bulk composition between planets and chondrites. Here we undertake a full, dynamical evaluation of 'crustal stripping' during accretion and its key geochemical consequences. We present smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations of collisions between differentiated rocky planetesimals and planetary embryos. We find that the crust is preferentially lost relative to the mantle during impacts, and we have developed a scaling law that approximates the mass of crust that remains in the largest remnant. Using this scaling law and a recent set of N-body simulations, we have estimated the maximum effect of crustal stripping on incompatible element abundances during the accretion of planetary embryos. We find that on average one third of the initial crust is stripped from embryos as they accrete, which leads to a reduction of ~20% in the budgets of the heat producing elements if the stripped crust does not reaccrete. Erosion of crusts can lead to non-chondritic ratios of incompatible elements, but the magnitude of this effect depends sensitively on the details of the crust-forming melting process. The Lu/Hf system is fractionated for a wide range of crustal formation scenarios. Using eucrites (the products of planetesimal silicate melting, thought to represent the crust of Vesta) as a guide to the Lu/Hf of planetesimal crust partially lost during accretion, we predict the Earth could evolve to a superchondritic 176-Hf/177-Hf (3-5 parts per ten thousand) at present day. Such values are in keeping with compositional estimates of the bulk Earth. Stripping of planetary crusts during accretion can lead to detectable changes in bulk composition of lithophile elements, but the fractionation is relatively subtle, and sensitive to the efficiency of reaccretion.

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arXiv2015

Compositional evolution during rocky protoplanet accretion

The Earth appears non-chondritic in its abundances of refractory lithophile elements, posing a significant problem for our understanding of its formation and evolution. It has been suggested that this non-chondritic composition may be explained by collisional erosion of differentiated planetesimals of originally chondritic composition. In this work, we present N-body simulations of terrestrial planet formation that track the growth of planetary embryos from planetesimals. We simulate evolution through the runaway and oligarchic growth phases under the Grand Tack model and in the absence of giant planets. These simulations include a state-of-the-art collision model which allows multiple collision outcomes, such as accretion, erosion, and bouncing events, that enables tracking of the evolving core mass fraction of accreting planetesimals. We show that the embryos grown during this intermediate stage of planet formation exhibit a range of core mass fractions, and that with significant dynamical excitation, enough mantle can be stripped from growing embryos to account for the Earth's non-chondritic Fe/Mg ratio. We also find that there is a large diversity in the composition of remnant planetesimals, with both iron-rich and silicate-rich fragments produced via collisions.

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arXiv2015

Numerically Predicted Indirect Signatures of Terrestrial Planet Formation

The intermediate phases of planet formation are not directly observable due to lack of emission from planetesimals. Planet formation is, however, a dynamically active process resulting in collisions between the evolving planetesimals and the production of dust. Thus, indirect observation of planet formation may indeed be possible in the near future. In this paper we present synthetic observations based on numerical N-body simulations of the intermediate phase of planet formation including a state-of-the-art collision model, EDACM, which allows multiple collision outcomes, such as, accretion, erosion, and bouncing events. We show that the formation of planetary embryos may be indirectly observable by a fully functioning ALMA telescope if the surface area involved in planetesimal evolution is sufficiently large and/or the amount of dust produced in the collisions is sufficiently high in mass.

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arXiv2014

A Collisional Origin to Earth's Non-chondritic Composition?

Several lines of evidence indicate a non-chondritic composition for Bulk Earth. If Earth formed from the accretion of chondritic material, its non-chondritic composition, in particular the super-chondritic 142Nd/144Nd and low Mg/Fe ratios, might be explained by the collisional erosion of differentiated planetesimals during its formation. In this work we use an N-body code, that includes a state-of-the-art collision model, to follow the formation of protoplanets, similar to proto-Earth, from differentiated planetesimals (> 100 km) up to isolation mass (> 0.16 M_Earth). Collisions between differentiated bodies have the potential to change the core-mantle ratio of the accreted protoplanets. We show that sufficient mantle material can be stripped from the colliding bodies during runaway and oligarchic growth, such that the final protoplanets could have Mg/Fe and Si/Fe ratios similar to that of bulk Earth, but only if Earth is an extreme case and the core is assumed to contain 10% silicon by mass. This may indicate an important role for collisional differentiation during the giant impact phase if Earth formed from chondritic material.

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arXiv2013

Hiding in the Shadows: Searching for Planets in Pre--transitional and Transitional Disks

Transitional and pre--transitional disks can be explained by a number of mechanisms. This work aims to find a single observationally detectable marker that would imply a planetary origin for the gap and, therefore, indirectly indicate the presence of a young planet. N-body simulations were conducted to investigate the effect of an embedded planet of one Jupiter mass on the production of instantaneous collisional dust derived from a background planetesimal disk. Our new model allows us to predict the dust distribution and resulting observable markers with greater accuracy than previous work. Dynamical influences from a planet on a circular orbit are shown to enhance dust production in the disk interior and exterior to the planet orbit while removing planetesimals from the the orbit itself creating a clearly defined gap. In the case of an eccentric planet the gap opened by the planet is not as clear as the circular case but there is a detectable asymmetry in the dust disk.

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arXiv2012

Collisions Between Gravity-Dominated Bodies: 1. Outcome Regimes and Scaling Laws

Collisions are the core agent of planet formation. In this work, we derive an analytic description of the dynamical outcome for any collision between gravity-dominated bodies. We conduct high-resolution simulations of collisions between planetesimals; the results are used to isolate the effects of different impact parameters on collision outcome. During growth from planetesimals to planets, collision outcomes span multiple regimes: cratering, merging, disruption, super-catastrophic disruption, and hit-and-run events. We derive equations (scaling laws) to demarcate the transition between collision regimes and to describe the size and velocity distributions of the post-collision bodies. The scaling laws are used to calculate maps of collision outcomes as a function of mass ratio, impact angle, and impact velocity, and we discuss the implications of the probability of each collision regime during planet formation. The analytic collision model presented in this work will significantly improve the physics of collisions in numerical simulations of planet formation and collisional evolution. (abstract abridged)

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