Collisional Growth and Fragmentation of Dust Aggregates. II. Mass Distribution of Icy Fragments

Abstract

Abstract By performing N-body simulations, we investigated the fundamental processes of collisions between dust aggregates composed of submicron-sized icy dust monomers. We examined the mass distribution of fragments in the collisional outcomes in a wide range of the mass ratio and the collision velocity between colliding dust aggregates. We derived analytic expressions of the mass distribution of large remnants and small fragments by numerical fitting to the simulation results. Our analytic formulae for masses of the large remnants can reproduce the contribution of mass transfer from a large target to a small projectile, which occurs for a mass ratio of ≳3 and is shown in a previous study. We found that the power-law index of the cumulative mass distribution of the small fragments is independent of the mass ratio and only weakly dependent on the collision velocity. On the other hand, the mass fraction of fragments of individual dust monomers decreases with an increasing total mass of colliding aggregates for a fixed mass ratio. This tendency implies that multiple hierarchical disruptive collisions (i.e., collisions between fragments, and collisions between fragments of fragments) are required for producing a large number of individual dust monomers via collisional fragmentation. Our fragment model suggests that the total geometric cross section integrated over the fragments is estimated to be about the same order as the geometric cross section of the target.