On the Instability of Saturn's Hypothetical Retrograde Co-orbitals
Abstract
We find an interesting fact that fictitious retrograde co-orbitals of Saturn, or small bodies inside the retrograde 1:1 resonance with Saturn, are highly unstable in our numerical simulations. It is shown that in the presence of Jupiter, the retrograde co-orbitals will get ejected from Saturn's co-orbital space within a timescale of 10 Myr. This scenario reminds us of the instability of Saturn Trojans caused by both the Great Inequality and the secular resonances. Therefore, we carry out in-depth inspections on both mechanisms and prove that the retrograde resonance overlap, raised by Great Inequality, cannot serve as an explanation for the instability of retrograde co-orbitals, due to the weakness of the retrograde 2:5 resonance with Jupiter at a low eccentricity. However, we discover that both and secular resonances contribute to the slow growth of the eccentricity, therefore, are possibly the primary causes of the instability inside Saturn's retrograde co-orbital space.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1901.10953,
title = {On the Instability of Saturn's Hypothetical Retrograde Co-orbitals},
author = {Yukun Huang and Miao Li and Junfeng Li and Shengping Gong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.10953},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
6 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS