Harold F. Levison

A scattered Uranus and Neptune, and implications for the asteroid belt

It has been proposed that Uranus and Neptune originated interior to ∽ 10 AU , as potential gas giant cores which were scattered outward when Jupiter won the race to reach runaway gas accretion. We present further numerical simulations of this scenario, which show that it reproduces the present configuration of the outer Solar System with a high degree of success for a wide range of initial conditions. Also, we show that this mechanism may have simultaneously ejected planets from the asteroid belt.