Tidal breakup of comets (Q1890136)

In the study of the orbital evolution of comets, a major issue has to do with their long-term survival. Recent investigations demonstrate that there is a 1 \% probability that a long-period comet would survive its long journey into interplanetary space before being turned into a dormant nucleus with little outgassing activity while the probability for short-period comets is 10--100 \%. The author examines difference between these cometary populations and enumerates the different possible destructive mechanisms that might be effective in causing cometary nuclei to disappear. These are: 1. collision with stray small bodies; 2. thermal stress; 3. local pressure force due to subsurface ice sublimation; 4. tidal disruption; 5. rotational breakup. It is shown that short-period comets and Centaurus have a high probability of being tidally disrupted during their orbital migration from the Kuiper belt to the inner solar system.