English

Orbital and absolute magnitude distribution of Hilda population

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2025-03-07 v1

Abstract

The Hilda population of asteroids is located in a large orbital zone of long-term stability associated with the Jupiter J3/2 mean motion resonance. They are a sister population of the Jupiter Trojans, since both of them are likely made up of objects captured from the primordial Kuiper belt early in the solar system history. Comparisons between the orbital and physical properties of the Hilda and Trojan populations thus represent a test of outer planet formation models. Here we use a decade of observations from the Catalina Sky Survey (G96 site) to determine the bias-corrected orbital and magnitude distributions of Hildas. We also identify collisional families and the background population by computing a new catalog of synthetic proper elements for Hildas. We model the cumulative magnitude distribution of the background population using a local power-law representation with slope γ(H)\gamma(H), where HH is the absolute magnitude. For the largest Hildas, we find γ0.5\gamma\simeq 0.5 with large uncertainty due to the limited population. Beyond H11H\simeq 11, we find that γ\gamma transitions to a mean value γˉ=0.32±0.04{\bar \gamma}=0.32\pm 0.04 with a slight dependence on HH (significantly smaller than Jupiter Trojans with γˉ=0.43±0.02{\bar \gamma}=0.43\pm 0.02). We find that members of identified collisional families represent more than 6060\% of the total population (both bias counts). The bias-corrected populations contain about the same number of Hildas within the families and the background for H16H\leq 16, but this number may increase to 6060\% families when their location in the orbital space is further improved in the future.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.04403,
  title  = {Orbital and absolute magnitude distribution of Hilda population},
  author = {David Vokrouhlický and David Nesvorný and Miroslav Brož and William F. Bottke and Rogerio Deienno and Carson D. Fuls and Frank C. Shelly},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.04403},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

41 pages, 27 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal