Binary Formation in Planetesimal Disks. I. Equal Mass Planetesimals

As of April 2010, 48 TNO (trans-Neptunian Object) binaries have been found. This is about 6% of known TNOs. However, in previous theoretical studies of planetary formation in the TNO region, the effect of binary formation has been neglected. TNO binaries can be formed through a variety of mechanisms, such as a three-body process, dynamical friction on two massive bodies, inelastic collisions between two bodies etc. Most of these mechanisms become more effective as the distance from the Sun increases. In this paper, we describe our study on three-body process using direct $N$ -body simulations. We found that chaos-assisted-capture (CAC) is the dominant channel of binary formation. We systematically changed the distance from the Sun, the number density of planetesimals, and the radius of the planetesimals and studied the effect of the binaries on the collision rate of planetesimals. In the TNO region, binaries are involved in 1 $/$ 3–1 $/$ 2 of collisions, and the collision rate increases by a factor of a few compared to the theoretical estimate for direct two-body collisions. Thus, it is possible that the binaries significantly enhance the collision rate and reduce the growth timescale. In the terrestrial planet region, binaries are less important, because the ratio between the Hill radius and the physical size of the planetesimals is relatively small. Although the time scale of our simulations is short, they clearly demonstrated that the accretion process in the TNO region is quite different from that in the terrestrial planet region.