Redistribution of Trojan Asteroids Between L4 and L5 Induced by Planetary Migration. Is it Symmetrical?

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We used N-body integration to investigate the stability of Trojan-type companions of the giant planets during planetary migration. A series of simulations were performed involving the migrating giant planets plus approximately 1000 test particle Trojans with initial distributions similar to those of Jupiter's current population of Trojan asteroids. A standard planet migration model was used in which the migration speed decreases exponentially with some characteristic time scale. During planetary migration, resonances between the host planet, a second planet and a Trojan can drive it out of the 1:1 resonance (see Kortenkamp et al 2004). Our simulations show that this loss mechanism can deplete Jupiter's initial Trojan population by up to 98%, depending on the migration time scale (slower migration leads to heavier losses). Conversely, the same resonances can also lead to greater stabilization of some Trojans, constricting them to tighter regions around the L4 or L5 Lagrange equilibrium regions. Our modeling shows that a combination of these de-stablizing and stabilizing resonant perturbations can lead to significant redistribution of Trojans between L4 and L5. Furthermore, all of the Jupiter Trojans observed to undergo such a redistribution transitioned from the trailing L5 region into the leading L4 region. However, the number of examples is quite small. Out of only 20 Jupiter Trojans surviving by the time the planets reached their present orbital configuration, just 2 had transitioned from L5 to L4. Redistribution of Neptune Trojans was much more pervasive as several hundred Trojans were observed to transition back and forth between L4 and L5 throughout the migration process. Additional modeling is being conducted to determine if asymmetries in the redistribution of Trojans result from initial choices of orbital and migration parameters or are merely a consequence of small number statistics. [This work is supported by NASA grant NNG06GD94G]

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