Collisional Focusing of Particles in Space Causing Jetstreams

Extract

Jetstreams probably played an important role at an intermediate stage of the formation of the solar system (Alfvén and Arrhenius, 1970). A Jetstream is defined here as a collection of grains moving in neighboring elliptical orbits around a central gravitating body and with the dynamics modified by the action of complicated collision processes among the grains themselves.

Three main types of collisions will take place in such a stream. Hyper-velocity impacts will lead to fragmentation of the grains involved. At lower impact velocities, the particles will retain their identities after the collision even if they might be deformed to some degree depending on impact velocity and internal structure of the grains. With still lower impact velocity, accretion can take place, the grains sticking together after collision to form larger grains. A common feature of these collision processes are that they will be partially inelastic. A certain fraction of the kinetic energy of the colliding particles will be spent on changing their internal structure. The internal kinetic energy in an isolated Jetstream thus will tend to decrease with time. The mass spectrum of the grains also will vary during the lifetime of a stream, the probability for accretive processes increasing with time.