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Giant Impacts Preferentially Remove Low-mass Atmospheres: A Generalised Scaling Law for Impact-driven Atmospheric Loss

  • Authors: Matthew J. Roche, Simon J. Lock, Philip J. Carter, Zoë M. Leinhardt

Matthew J. Roche et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1011 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 3.

Our new scaling law captures the effects of atmospheric mass on loss and can predict the combined atmospheric loss fraction for the simulations in our fitting dataset with an average misfit in absolute atmospheric loss of ∼4.0%. Simulated (from our SPH simulations) near-field, far-field, and combined loss fraction data (from this study and the data from M. J. Roche et al. 2025) are plotted against the corresponding values predicted using our scaling law for each value of atmospheric mass fraction (colors), impact parameter (shapes), and impact velocity (marker sizes), with the maximum misfits and rms reported in each panel. Note that here we do not demarcate different values of γ or ﹩{M}_{{\rm{t}}}^{{\rm{r}}}﹩.

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