Hypothetical evolutions of short-period comets

Extract

The hypothetical model of capture I consider is as follows: a comet with an initial conic orbit, meets close to one of its vertices an outer planet and generates one or several little comets (crossing of the Roche limit) with an elliptic orbit. This initial vertex always remains one of the vertices of the captured orbit by the Solar System. Even if there is a discontinuity of all the orbital elements during a very short time of the capture, I assume that the orbital plane is unchanged during the capture, as indeed was the case for Brooks 2 in 1886 (see Belyaev et al., 1986) or will be for Gehrels 3 in 2300 (see Carusi et al., 1985). After this first decisive step, the “new” comets may be subject to some other captures by jovian planets during their evolution with the same scenario. All these hypotheses allow to find particular numerical results for 142 comets whose current orbital elements were found in the Marsden catalog or given by P. Rocher, but I shall only give several examples in the following section.