Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.2207h&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #22.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.426
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Optical spectroscopy of several hundred Trojan asteroids has pointed to the possibility of a correlation between the colors of these objects and their orbital inclinations (Fornasier et al 2007, Szabo et al 2007). Observations seem to imply that Trojans with higher inclinations are redder in color. To examine whether this color-inclination relation is a dynamical effect, and also to understand the degree to which it contributes to attributing a capture or primordial origin to Trojan asteroids, we numerically integrated the orbits of a few thousand of these objects (including real and synthetic ones) for different values of their eccentricities (0-0.4) and orbital inclinations (0-60 deg). Our simulations indicate that the dynamical state of Trojans and their orbital stability are driven by the initial values of their orbital elements. Long-term stability is generally achieved for objects with low eccentricities and low inclinations. Results also show that there is a trend between the lifetime of a Trojan and its orbital inclination; for a given eccentricity, a Trojan with higher initial orbital inclination tends to be short-lived. This, combined with the redder color of high inclination Trojans, implies that these objects might have been products of recent captures from the outer regions of the solar system. We will present the details of the results of our numerical simulations and discuss their applicability to possible scenarios for the origin of Trojan Asteroids.
This work is partially supported by the NASA Astrobiology Institute under the cooperative agreement NNA04CC08A at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii for NH.
Haghighipour Nader
Yang Bokai
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