Asteroid impact and eccentricity of Earth’s orbit

Pirooz Mohazzabi and James A. Luecke

Citation: American Journal of Physics 71, 687 (2003); doi: 10.1119/1.1571840

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 Asteroid impact and eccentricity of Earth’s orbit
Pirooz Mohazzabia) and James A. Luecke
Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Kenosha, Wisconsin 53141
共Received 2 December 2002; accepted 12 March 2003兲
We obtain a simple equation that accurately describes the eccentricity that an asteroid or comet
impact can cause in the Earth’s nearly circular orbit about the Sun. It is found that the present
eccentricity of the Earth could not have been caused or significantly altered by an asteroid or comet
impact in the near past, nor could it be significantly altered by the impact of any asteroid or comet
known to astronomers today. © 2003 American Association of Physics Teachers.
关DOI: 10.1119/1.1571840兴

I. INTRODUCTION comet with the Earth is essentially perfectly inelastic, in

Since the Earth was formed some 4.5 billion years ago,
asteroids and comets have routinely collided with it, with the
most recent major collision, the Tunguska Event, occurring
on June 30, 1908, at 7:14 am in Central Siberia.1,2 Although
asteroids capable of global catastrophe are extremely rare,
120 of them have been identified.3 The orbits of these aster-
oids are such that they come close enough to the Earth so
that they could potentially be perturbed into a collision
course with the Earth.
An asteroid capable of catastrophic damage to our planet
must have a diameter of the order of a kilometer or more.
There is no shortage of such large-size asteroids. It is esti-
mated that there are about 1000 asteroids with diameters
greater than 1 km,4 – 6 and much more with smaller
diameters.7,8 Ceres, the largest known asteroid, has a diam-
eter of about 950 km.9,10 The object that caused the Chicxu-
lub crater in Yucatan, Mexico, is estimated to have had a
diameter in the range of 10–14 km if the object had been an
asteroid and about 12 km if it had been a comet.11 This
impact is believed to have caused, among other things, the
extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.11–13
Asteroids are thought by most astronomers to be Sun-
orbiting rocky or metallic objects with masses substantially
less than that of Mercury and, because of their low masses,
not to have atmospheres. Tens of thousands of asteroids orbit
between Mars and Jupiter 共the asteroid belt兲, but some have
‘‘Earth-crossing’’ orbits.14 Comets, on the other hand, are
often referred to as ‘‘dirty snowballs’’ because they are
thought to consist of dust and various ices of water, carbon
dioxide, ammonia, and methane. Most comets have highly
eccentric orbits, many of which extend from inside the
Earth’s orbit to beyond the orbit of Pluto.15
If the object that caused the Chicxulub crater were an as-
teroid, its density would have been between 1300–3400
kg/m3, and it would have struck the Earth with a speed of
20–25 km/s. On the other hand, if it were a comet, its density
would have been about 500–1000 kg/m3 and it would have
struck the Earth with a speed as high as 70 or 80 km/s.16 For
comparison, the mean density of the Earth is about 5500
kg/m3, and its orbital speed about the Sun is about 30 km/s.
The kinetic energy of the Chicxulub object just before
impact is estimated to be of the order of 5⫻1023 J.11 Because
the mass of the Earth is about 6⫻1024 kg, if all this energy
were transferred to the Earth as kinetic energy during the
impact, the Earth would have received about 0.1 J of kinetic
energy per kilogram of its mass. However, this energy trans-
fer did not happen because the collision of an asteroid or
which case almost the entire kinetic energy of the colliding
body is transformed into internal energy.
Asteroids with diameters on the order of 100 m explode in
the atmosphere before reaching the ground.17 The Tunguska
event is believed to have been caused by a small stony as-
teroid, about 60 m in diameter, which exploded at an altitude
of about 8.5 km.2,18,19 It has been estimated that, on the av-
erage, a Tunguska-class event with an equivalent energy of
about 10 megatons of TNT occurs once every 1000 years.20
On the other hand, objects with diameters of about 1 km and
larger pass through the atmosphere and reach the ground
with little reduction in their kinetic energies, because the
atmosphere does not pose much resistance to them. These
objects do not explode on entering the atmosphere mainly
because the shock waves produced by the atmosphere do not
have enough time to cross the object before it reaches the
ground.17
The current understanding is that the planets of the inner
solar system, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, were formed
from the coalescence of smaller bodies called planetesimals,
a process that tends to make the orbits of the resulting plan-
ets circular. Computer simulations show that at the end of the
accretion, these planets must have had isolated and nearly
circular orbits around the Sun with eccentricities between
0.01 and 0.07.21 Some of the observed eccentricities today,
however, are quite different from the predicted values. A nu-
merical solution of the Lagrangian system of equations of the
planetary point masses, including lunar and relativistic con-
tributions, reveals that the eccentricity, as well as other as-
tronomical parameters of the Earth’s orbit, continuously vary
over time.22 The resulting data, which is expected to be reli-
able within an accuracy of about 0.1% over the last 5 million
years, indicate that the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit has
varied between 0.000 267 and 0.057 133 during this time
with a quasiperiod of 96 805 years. These calculations, how-
ever, ignore asteroid contributions or any possible perturba-
tions caused by asteroid or comet impacts.
In light of this discussion, the question remains as to the
extent of the perturbation of the Earth’s orbit about the Sun
as a result of an asteroid or comet impact. More specifically,
it is known that the Earth currently has a nearly circular orbit
with an eccentricity of 0.0167.23 Can the impact of an aster-
oid or comet, the size of the one that caused the Chicxulub
crater, result in eccentricities of this magnitude? Can such an
impact significantly alter the eccentricity of the orbit of the
Earth 共or other planets兲, and thereby influence the accuracy
of the values reported for the last 5 million years? These are
the questions that we shall address in this article.

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 where M is the mass of the Earth and V⬘ is the velocity of
the Earth–asteroid combination just after the impact. If we
assume a near-Earth asteroid in the orbital plane of the Earth,
all velocity vectors before and after the collision lie in two
dimensions, the xy plane. In terms of components, Eq. 共2兲
can be written as
m v x ⫹M V⫽ 共 m⫹M 兲 V x⬘ , 共3a兲
m v y ⫽ 共 m⫹M 兲 V ⬘y . 共3b兲
The components of the asteroid velocity may also be written
as
v x ⫽ v cos ␪ , 共4a兲
v y ⫽ v sin ␪ . 共4b兲
We define the dimensionless parameter ␣ as the ratio of the
mass of the asteroid to that of the Earth,
m
␣⫽ , 共5兲
M
Fig. 1. A diagram showing the velocity of the asteroid or comet v and the and write Eqs. 共3兲 as
velocity of the Earth V just before impact, both relative to the Sun. The xy
coordinate system is chosen so that the impact takes place at the origin. The V⫹ ␣ v x
circular orbit of the Earth before impact is depicted by the dashed circle. V x⬘ ⫽ , 共6a兲
1⫹ ␣

␣vy
We begin by considering an ideal case in which the Earth V ⬘y ⫽ , 共6b兲
is initially in a circular orbit about the Sun and find the 1⫹ ␣
eccentricity of its perturbed orbit resulting from an asteroid from which we find
or comet impact. We then derive a more tractable approxi-
mation and validate it by comparison to the exact form. Fi- 1
nally, we note that the approximation reflects some qualita- V ⬘ 2 ⫽V ⬘x 2 ⫹V ⬘y 2 ⫽ 共 V 2 ⫹ ␣ 2 v 2 ⫹2 ␣ V v x 兲 . 共7兲
共 1⫹ ␣ 兲 2
tively aspects of the problem. We will find that although the
eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit continuously changes as a In general, the closed orbit of a particle of mass ␮ moving
result of planetary and other perturbations, its observed value under a central potential energy function of the type
and any appreciable change in its value cannot be attributed
to an asteroid or comet impact known to astronomers, or to a k
U 共 r 兲 ⫽⫺ , 共8兲
series of such impacts. r
where k is a positive constant, is an ellipse with an eccen-
tricity given by24

冉 冊
II. DYNAMICS OF ASTEROID IMPACT
1/2
2E ␮ ᐉ 2
Consider the Earth initially in a circular orbit about the e⫽ 1⫹ . 共9兲
Sun. We choose a Cartesian coordinate system such that just k2
before the impact, the Earth is at the origin, moving in the x
In Eq. 共9兲 E is the total energy and ᐉ is the magnitude of the
direction with velocity V relative to the Sun, as shown in angular momentum per unit mass of the particle about the
Fig. 1. The Sun is located on the y axis a distance r from the center of the force.
Earth, and is taken to be at rest in an inertial reference sys- For the Earth–asteroid combination after the impact, ␮
tem. The magnitude of V, which is the speed of the Earth in
⫽M ⫹m, and the constant k in Eq. 共8兲 for the gravitational
its circular orbit about the Sun, is related to its orbital radius
potential energy between the combination and the Sun is
r by
given by

V⫽ 冑 GM 0
r
, 共1兲
k⫽G 共 M ⫹m 兲 M 0 .
The total energy of the Earth-asteroid system after the impact
共10兲

where G is the gravitational constant, and M 0 is the mass of is, therefore,

the Sun.
1 G 共 M ⫹m 兲 M 0
At this moment, an asteroid of mass m moving with ve- E⫽ 共 M ⫹m 兲 V ⬘ 2 ⫺ . 共11兲
locity v relative to the Sun, collides with the Earth. Because 2 r
the collision is almost perfectly inelastic, conservation of lin-
The magnitude of the angular momentum per unit mass of
ear momentum requires that
the Earth–asteroid combination relative to the Sun is given
mv⫹M V⫽ 共 m⫹M 兲 V⬘ , 共2兲 by

688 Am. J. Phys., Vol. 71, No. 7, July 2003 P. Mohazzabi and J. A. Luecke 688
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 ᐉ⫽ 兩 r⫻V⬘ 兩 ⫽ 兩 rV ⬘x 兩 . 共12兲
If we substitute for E, ␮ , ᐉ, and k in Eq. 共9兲 and simplify the
resulting expression, we obtain

冋 冉 冊冉
e⫽ 1⫹V x⬘ 2
GM 0
r
2

V⬘ ⫺
2
2GM 0
r
冊册 1/2

. 共13兲

Note that the mass of the Earth–asteroid combination can-

cels. If we use Eq. 共1兲, Eq. 共13兲 reduces to

冋
e⫽ 1⫹
V2
冉
V x⬘ 2 V ⬘ 2
V2
⫺2 冊册
1/2

. 共14兲

Finally, if we substitute for V x⬘ and V ⬘ from Eqs. 共6兲 and 共7兲,

respectively, and use Eq. 共4a兲, we obtain

e⫽ 1⫹再 共 1⫹ ␣ 兲 2 冋
共 1⫹ ␣␥ cos ␪ 兲 2 1⫹ ␣ 2 ␥ 2 ⫹2 ␣␥ cos ␪
共 1⫹ ␣ 兲 2
⫺2 册冎 1/2

, Fig. 2. Reduced eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit caused by an asteroid or

where
v
␥⫽ . 共16兲
V
Equation 共15兲 describes the eccentricity of the orbit of the
Earth as a result of an asteroid impact.
To avoid round-off errors resulting from subtraction of
two nearly equal numbers, we recast Eq. 共15兲 into a more
computationally manageable form by a few algebraic ma-
nipulations,
1 These observations, which are shown in Fig. 2, can be
e⫽ 兵 ␣ 2 关 4⫹ ␥ 2 ⫺8 ␥ cos ␪ ⫹3 ␥ 2 cos2 ␪ 兴
共 1⫹ ␣ 兲 2
⫹ ␣ 3 关 4⫹2 ␥ 共 ␥ 2 ⫺2 兲 cos ␪ ⫺4 ␥ 2 cos2 ␪ ⫹2 ␥ 3 cos3 ␪ 兴
⫹ ␣ 4 关 1⫹ ␥ 2 共 ␥ 2 ⫺2 兲 cos2 ␪ 兴 其 1/2.
Values of ␣ for the asteroids and comets that have collided
with the Earth in the recent past 共in geological terms兲 have
been generally much less than unity. As noted, the object that
created the Chicxulub crater had an estimated diameter in the
range of 10–14 km11 and a density in the range of 500–3400
kg/m3, depending on whether it was an asteroid or comet.
These numbers give a mass ratio ␣ in the range of 4.4
⫻10⫺11⭐ ␣ ⭐8.4⫻10⫺10. Consequently, we need to retain
only the leading term in Eq. 共17兲, which is quadratic in ␣ ,
and approximate Eq. 共17兲 by
e⫽ ␣ 共 4⫹ ␥ 2 ⫺8 ␥ cos ␪ ⫹3 ␥ 2 cos2 ␪ 兲 1/2,
which reduces to a more useful form,
e⫽ ␣ 关 4 共 1⫺ ␥ cos ␪ 兲 2 ⫹ ␥ 2 sin2 ␪ 兲 ] 1/2.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The validity of the approximation given by Eq. 共19兲 can be
seen from Fig. 2, where e is plotted along with the exact
result, Eq. 共17兲. We have considered the worst-case scenario,
the asteroid Ceres, which has a diameter of 950 km9,10 and a
mass of 4.762⫻10⫺10 solar units25 with both a low-end as-
teroid velocity, ␥ ⫽0.5, and a high-end comet velocity, ␥
⫽3.0. Clearly, the agreement between Eqs. 共17兲 and 共19兲 is
excellent and their difference is essentially indistinguishable.
comet impact as a function of the impact angle for two extreme speeds of
the impacting object. The solid curves represent the exact results, Eq. 共17兲,
共15兲 and the circles are the approximate results from Eq. 共19兲.
Consequently, we can always safely use Eq. 共19兲, which has
a much simpler functional form than Eq. 共17兲.
Inspection of Eq. 共19兲 shows that for ␥ ⬍4/3, e has a local
minimum at ␪ ⫽0, a local maximum at ␪ ⫽ ␲ , and no other
maxima or minima. For ␥ ⭓4/3, e has local maxima at ␪
⫽0 and ␪ ⫽ ␲ , and local minima at ␪ ⫽arccos(4/3␥ ) and ␪
⫽2 ␲ ⫺arccos(4/3␥ ). The value of e at ␪ ⫽ ␲ is the absolute
maximum.
qualitatively explained as follows. For an impact with ␪
⫽0, the Earth receives an impulse in a direction tangent to
its circular orbit. It can be shown that a tangential impulse
elongates or shrinks the orbit in the radial direction depend-
共17兲 ing on whether the collision is from behind or head on,
respectively.26,27 For a radial impact, ␪ ⫽ ␲ /2, on the other
hand, the orbit deforms in the tangential direction. Conse-
quently, a smaller eccentricity should result at some interme-
diate impact angle. This is clearly true for high-speed im-
pacts, ␥ ⭓4/3. The equality sign in this case corresponds to
the minima in the eccentricity at ␪ ⫽ ␲ /4 and ␪ ⫽7 ␲ /4.
When ␥ ⬍4/3, the speed of the colliding object relative to the
Earth is small. Consequently, for ␪ ⫽0 the collision most
nearly resembles that of a ‘‘soft landing,’’ but becomes more
and more perturbing as the head-on collision, ␪ ⫽ ␲ , is ap-
proached.
共18兲 In either case, the maximum eccentricity is rendered to the
orbit of the Earth by a head-on collision, ␪ ⫽ ␲ , and is given
by
共19兲
e max⫽2 ␣ 共 1⫹ ␥ 兲 . 共20兲
For ␥ ⫽1, a zero-angle collision does not perturb the orbit of
the Earth at all as this is truly a soft landing.
Many of the scars formed on Earth by asteroid or comet
impacts, especially in the early stages after its formation,
have disappeared or become hidden as a result of the Earth’s
changing surface geology. To date over 160 impact craters
have been identified on Earth.28 The oldest and perhaps the
world’s largest crater that has been discovered is the Vrede-
fort crater in South Africa.29,30 Although the Chicxulub crater
is the third largest crater in terms of diameter, the objects that

689 Am. J. Phys., Vol. 71, No. 7, July 2003 P. Mohazzabi and J. A. Luecke 689
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 caused the three largest craters on Earth are believed to have
had comparable sizes and speeds. If we assume a diameter of
5
14 km, an impact speed of 80 km/s, and a density compa-
rable to that of the Earth, then according to Eq. 共20兲 the
maximum eccentricity caused in the orbit of the Earth by the 6
Chicxulub impact is ⬇9.7⫻10⫺9 . This value is far less than
the present eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit 共0.0167兲 and even
7
the smallest value calculated over the last 5 million years 8
共0.000 267兲.22 Indeed, even an asteroid of the size of Ceres
impacting the Earth at 80 km/s can cause a maximum eccen- 9
tricity of only 0.0012. However, there is no evidence of such
an impact on the Earth, at least not in the recent past.
10
IV. CONCLUSION
11
A simple equation 共19兲 describes the eccentricity caused in
the otherwise circular orbit of the Earth 共or any other planet兲
about the Sun as a result of an asteroid or comet impact. It is
found that the observed eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit could
not have been caused or significantly altered by a single as-
12
teroid or comet impact since its formation, or at least in the
near geological past. No asteroid or comet known to astrono-
13
mers today can bring about perturbations of this magnitude,
particularly because Ceres alone comprises over one-third 14
the total mass of all the asteroids.10 Although it is possible in 15
principle for a series of asteroid or comet impacts to cumu- 16
latively cause the observed eccentricity in the orbit of the
17
Earth or to significantly change it, it is highly unlikely be-
cause a series of random impacts, on the average, tend to 18
result in no orbital perturbation.
Perturbations in the Earth’s orbit resulting from the aster- 19
oids and comets that are known to have impacted the Earth
20
in the recent past, as well as those that will possibly collide
with the Earth in the future, are too small to influence the
accuracy of the eccentricities reported for the last 5 million
21
years. The eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit, however, will
continue to evolve and fluctuate in the future as a result of 22
planetary, lunar, and relativistic perturbations.22
23
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
24
We are grateful to Dr. D. H. Bruning, Dr. B. Greenebaum,
25
and Dr. J. H. Shea for their many helpful suggestions. This
work was supported in part by a URAP grant from the Col-
lege of Arts and Sciences of the University of Wisconsin– 26
Parkside.
27
a兲
Electronic mail: pirooz.mohazzabi@uwp.edu
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