Chaotic Structure of the Asteroid belt and Origin of Mars--crossers

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

The chaotic structure of the asteroid belt is explored, taking into account first only the perturbations provided by the 4 giant planets, and then including also the effects of the inner planets. We find that both the inner belt (a<2.5 AU) and the outer part of the main belt (a>2.8 AU) are mostly chaotic. In the outer part of the belt chaos is due to the presence of numerous mean motion resonances with Jupiter and three-body resonances Jupiter-Saturn-asteroid. In the inner belt, chaos is generated by mean motion resonances with Mars and three-body resonances Mars-Jupiter-asteroid. Due to the chaoticity of the belt, asteroids tend to slowly migrate in eccentricity. This phenomenon of ``chaotic diffusion'' allows many bodies in the inner belt to become Mars-crossers. The number of asteroids leaking out from the inner belt is large enough to keep the population of Mars-crossing asteroids in steady state, despite of the short dynamical lifetime of the latter. We speculate that chaotic diffusion could have substantially eroded the high-eccentricity part of the asteroid belt, and provided the impactors responsible for the Late Heavy bombardment phase of the early Solar System.

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