Abstract
Stars passing through the Oort cloud eject comets to interstellar space and initiate showers of comets into the planetary region. Monte Carlo simulations of such passages are performed on a representative distribution of cometary orbits. Ejected comets generally lie along a narrow tunnel “drilled” by the star through the cloud. However, shower comets come from the entire cloud, and do not give a strong signature of the star’s passage, except in the inverse semimajor axis distribution for the shower comets. The planetary system is likely not experiencing a cometary shower at this time.
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© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Weissman, P.R. (1996). Star Passages through the Oort Cloud. In: Rickman, H., Valtonen, M.J. (eds) Worlds in Interaction: Small Bodies and Planets of the Solar System. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0209-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0209-1_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-6578-8
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