Where are the Uranus Trojans?

From MaRDI portal
Publication:990339

DOI10.1007/S10569-010-9261-YzbMATH Open1291.70037arXiv0911.2366OpenAlexW3101889912MaRDI QIDQ990339FDOQ990339


Authors: J. Martínez Edit this on Wikidata


Publication date: 31 August 2010

Published in: Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The area of stable motion for fictitious Trojan asteroids around Uranus' equilateral equilibrium points is investigated with respect to the inclination of the asteroid's orbit to determine the size of the regions and their shape. For this task we used the results of extensive numerical integrations of orbits for a grid of initial conditions around the points L4 and L5, and analyzed the stability of the individual orbits. Our basic dynamical model was the Outer Solar System (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). We integrated the equations of motion of fictitious Trojans in the vicinity of the stable equilibrium points for selected orbits up to the age of the Solar system of 5 billion years. One experiment has been undertaken for cuts through the Lagrange points for fixed values of the inclinations, while the semimajor axes were varied. The extension of the stable region with respect to the initial semimajor axis lies between 19.05 < a < 19.3 AU but depends on the initial inclination. In another run the inclination of the asteroids' orbit was varied in the range 0 < i < 60 and the semimajor axes were fixed. It turned out that only four 'windows' of stable orbits survive: these are the orbits for the initial inclinations 0 < i < 7, 9 < i < 13, 31 < i < 36 and 38 < i < 50. We postulate the existence of at least some Trojans around the Uranus Lagrange points for the stability window at small and also high inclinations.


Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0911.2366




Recommendations




Cites Work


Cited In (6)





This page was built for publication: Where are the Uranus Trojans?

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q990339)