Co-orbital Asteroids as the Source of Venus's Zodiacal Dust Ring
Abstract
Photometry from the Helios and STEREO spacecraft revealed regions of enhanced sky surface-brightness suggesting a narrow circumsolar ring of dust associated with Venus's orbit. We model this phenomenon by integrating the orbits of 10,000,000+ dust particles subject to gravitational and non-gravitational forces, considering several different kinds of plausible dust sources. We find that only particles from a hypothetical population of Venus co-orbital asteroids can produce enough signal in a narrow ring to match the observations. Previous works had suggested such objects would be dynamically unstable. However, we re-examined the stability of asteroids in 1:1 resonance with Venus and found that ~8% should survive for the age of the solar system, enough to supply the observed ring.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1904.12404,
title = {Co-orbital Asteroids as the Source of Venus's Zodiacal Dust Ring},
author = {Petr Pokorný and Marc J. Kuchner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.12404},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
18 pages, 7 figures, Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters