Master's thesis

Estimating Water Transfer during Planetary Formation using Interpolated Results from SPH Collision Catalogues

Still following the basic question "How did water get on the Earth?" I continued in my Master's thesis where I stopped in my Bachelor's Thesis.

Abstract

To understand how water came to Earth, we need to better understand the late stage of terrestrial planetary formation. Many N-Body simulations were run in the past describing the mass and water transport and accretion of mass when smaller planetesimals and protoplanetary embryos collide to form the final planets. One major detail that is only considered more accurately recently is the fact that during these collisions mass is lost into space, which affects the final mass and water content of the solar system. But often this is neglected in favour of assuming bodies merge perfectly without mass loss. In this thesis, we propose two alternative methods to estimate this mass loss without having to simulate the physical collision in high resolution by using an existing dataset of collision outcomes. We run a total of 98 N-Body simulations implementing these water loss estimation methods in addition to a randomized mass loss and assuming perfect merging. When comparing our results with existing research, we can reproduce most effects compared to more complex mass loss setups. When considering mass loss, final bodies are less massive and contain significantly less water. In addition, our methods implicitly takes into consideration that earlier collisions are less impactful and shows that most water is accreted in a small number of later collisions. Finally, we confirm that without considering Hit-and-Run collision scenarios, the duration of terrestrial planetary formation cannot be accurately modelled.