Triton’s Surface Age and Impactor Population Revisited in Light of Kuiper Belt Fluxes: Evidence for Small Kuiper Belt Objects and Recent Geological Activity

Abstract

Neptune's largest satellite, Triton, is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic bodies in the solar system. Among its numerous interesting traits, Triton appears to have far fewer craters than would be expected if its surface were primordial. Here we combine the best available crater count data for Triton with improved estimates of impact rates by including the Kuiper belt as a source of impactors. We find that the population of impactors creating the smallest observed craters on Triton must be subkilometer in scale and that this small-impactor population can be best fitted by a differential power-law size index near -3. Such results provide interesting, indirect probes of the unseen small body population of the Kuiper belt. Based on the modern, Kuiper belt and Oort cloud impactor flux estimates, we also recalculate estimated ages for several regions of Triton's surface imaged by Voyager 2, and find that Triton was probably quite geologically active on a timescale no greater than 0.1–0.3 Gyr ago (indicating Triton was still active after some 90% to 98% of the age of the solar system), and perhaps even more recently. This activity must surpass that explainable by the surface geysers seen by Voyager 2 by many orders of magnitude. The time-averaged volumetric resurfacing rate on Triton implied by these results, 0.01 km3 yr-1 or more, is likely second only to Io and Europa in the outer solar system, and is within an order of magnitude of estimates for Venus and for the Earth's intraplate zones. This finding indicates that Triton likely remains a highly geologically active world at present, some 4.5 Gyr after its formation. We briefly speculate on how such a situation might obtain.