How Long-Lived Are the Hypothetical Trojan Populations of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune?

Details How Long-Lived Are the Hypothetical Trojan Populations of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? How Long-Lived Are the Hypothetical Trojan Populations of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune?

Dec 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002icar..160..271n&link_type=abstract

Icarus, Volume 160, Issue 2, p. 271-288.

Computer Science

43

Scientific paper

We investigate the possibility that fractions of the primordial populations at the triangular Lagrangian points of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have survived to the present and form (as yet unobserved) clusters of bodies coorbiting with these planets. Such leftovers would be analogs of the numerous objects (Trojans) leading and trailing the revolutions of Jupiter around the Sun. We focus on the dynamical stability of such populations over the age of the Solar System, assuming the current configuration of planets, and also discuss effects of the early radial migration of the outer planets. Our results suggest that, while Saturn's and Uranus' primordial Trojan populations should have been depleted by a factor of 100, Neptune may retain 50% of its original population of Trojans. A population of neptunian Trojans comparable to, or even larger than, Jupiter's Trojan population cannot be ruled out by existing observations. We compute the present-day sky densities of the hypothetical Trojans of the outer planets which can be used to guide observational surveys. Finally, we propose that the long-term instabilities that cause some jovian Trojans to escape the region of the Lagrange points at the present are due to three-body resonances.

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