• DOI:10.1016/j.icarus.2020.113824
Corpus ID: 218628659

Constraining the final merger of contact binary (486958) Arrokoth with soft-sphere discrete element simulations

@article{Marohnic2020ConstrainingTF,
  title={Constraining the final merger of contact binary (486958) Arrokoth with soft-sphere discrete element simulations},
  author={J. Marohnic and D. Richardson and W. McKinnon and H. Agrusa and J. DeMartini and A. Cheng and S. Stern and C. Olkin and H. Weaver and J. Spencer and The New Horizons Team},
  journal={Icarus},
  year={2020},
  pages={113824}
}

• J. Marohnic, D. Richardson, +8 authors The New Horizons Team
• Published 2020
• Physics, Geology
• Icarus

Abstract The New Horizons mission has returned stunning images of the bilobate Kuiper belt object (486958) Arrokoth. It is a contact binary, formed from two intact and relatively undisturbed predecessor objects joined by a narrow contact region. We use a version of pkdgrav, an N-body code that allows for soft-sphere collisions between particles, to model a variety of possible merger scenarios with the aim of constraining how Arrokoth may have evolved from two Kuiper belt objects into its… Expand

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