Collisional rates and impact velocities of short-period comets with interplanetary particles

Abstract

Distributions of collision velocities between short-period comets and particles in the asteroid belt are computed for a sample of 159 objects. For every comet, the mean intrinsic collision probability and the mean collision velocity were obtained. The mean values for the complete sample are 〈P i 〉=1.51×10 −18 km 2 year −1 and 〈v col 〉=10.86 km s −1, and the results for the observable and lost comet samples are: 〈P i 〉=1.45×10 −18 km −2 year −1, 〈v col 〉=10.45 km s −1, and 〈P i 〉=1.88×10 −18 km −2 year −1, 〈v col 〉=12.78 km s −1, respectively. The results obtained show that the collisions occur over a wide and asymmetric range of velocities, and the distributions for individual objects are completely different from each other and often contain fine structure, irregularities and spikes