English

The Pan-STARRS 1 Discoveries of five new Neptune Trojans

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2016-11-09 v1

Abstract

In this work we report the detection of seven Neptune Trojans (NTs) in the Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) survey. Five of these are new discoveries, consisting of four L4 Trojans and one L5 Trojan. Our orbital simulations show that the L5 Trojan stably librates for only several million years. This suggests that the L5 Trojan must be of recent capture origin. On the other hand, all four new L4 Trojans stably occupy the 1:1 resonance with Neptune for more than 1 Gyr. They can, therefore, be of primordial origin. Our survey simulation results show that the inclination width of the Neptune Trojan population should be between 77^{\circ} and 2727^{\circ} at >> 95% confidence, and most likely 11\sim 11^{\circ}. In this paper, we describe the PS1 survey, the Outer Solar System pipeline, the confirming observations, and the orbital/physical properties of the new Neptune Trojans.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1609.04677,
  title  = {The Pan-STARRS 1 Discoveries of five new Neptune Trojans},
  author = {Hsing Wen Lin and Ying-Tung Chen and Matthew J. Holman and Wing-Huen Ip and M. J. Payne and P. Lacerda and W. C. Fraser and D. W. Gerdes and A. Bieryla and Z. -F. Sie and W. -P. Chen and W. S. Burgett and L. Denneau and R. Jedicke and N. Kaiser and E. A. Magnier and J. L. Tonry and R. J. Wainscoat and C. Waters},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.04677},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

24 pages, 6 figures, AJ accepted