Related papers: Origin and Evolution of Jupiter's Trojan Asteroids
The Trojan asteroids provide a unique perspective on the history of Solar System. As a large population of small bodies, they record important gravitational interactions and dynamical evolution of the Solar System. In the past decade,…
Trojan asteroids orbit in the Lagrange points of the system Sun-planet-asteroid. Their dynamical stability make their physical properties important proxies for the early evolution of our solar system. To study their origin, we want to…
Jupiter Trojans are thought to be survivors of a much larger population of planetesimals that existed in the planetary region when planets formed. They can provide important constraints on the mass and properties of the planetesimal disk,…
Jupiter Trojan asteroids are located around L4 and L5 Lagrangian points on relatively stable orbits, in 1:1 MMR with Jupiter. However, not all of them lie in orbits that remain stable over the age of the Solar System. Unstable zones allow…
The Trojan asteroids of Jupiter and Neptune are likely to have been captured from original heliocentric orbits in the dynamically excited ("hot") population of the Kuiper belt. However, it has long been known that the optical color…
Of the four giant planets in the Solar system, only Jupiter and Neptune are currently known to possess swarms of Trojan asteroids - small objects that experience a 1:1 mean motion resonance with their host planet. In Lykawka et al. (2009),…
Context. More than 10000 Jupiter Trojans have been detected so far. They are moving around the L4 and L5 triangular Lagrangian points of the Sun-Jupiter system and their distributions can provide important clues to the early evolution of…
One of the most enigmatic and hitherto unexplained properties of Jupiter Trojans is their bimodal color distribution. This bimodality is indicative of two sub-populations within the Trojans, which have distinct size distributions. In this…
We present analytic and numerical results which illustrate the effects of Jupiter's accretion of nebular gas and the planet's radial migration on its Trojan companions. Initially, we approximate the system by the planar circular restricted…
The Trojan asteroids orbit about the Lagrangian points of Jupiter and the residence times about their present location are very long for most of them. If these bodies originated in the outer Solar System, they should be mainly composed of…
Jupiter Trojans are are characterized by dark photometric colors, high inclinations and an asymmetry in number of bodies between the two swarms. Different models have been proposed to explain the high inclination of the Trojans and to…
The leading theory for the origin of Jupiter Trojans (JTs) assumes that JTs were captured to their orbits near the Lagrangian points of Jupiter during the early reconfiguration of the giant planets. The natural source region for the…
Jupiter Trojans appear to be a key population of small bodies to study and test the models of the Solar System formation and evolution. Because understanding the evolution of Trojans can bring strong and unique constraints on the origins of…
To date, reflectance spectra of Jupiter Trojan asteroids have revealed no distinctive absorption features. For this reason, the surface composition of these objects remains a subject of speculation. Spectra have revealed, however, that the…
Trojan asteroids are minor planets that share the orbit of a planet about the Sun and librate around the L4 or L5 Lagrangian points of stability. They are important solar-system fossils because they carry information on early Solar System…
Due to their strong resonances with their host planet, Trojan asteroids can remain in stable orbits for billions of years. As a result, they are powerful probes for constraining the dynamical and chemical history of the solar system.…
We present a series of numerical integrations of observed and fictitious Jupiter Trojan asteroids, under the gravitational effects of the four outer planets, for time-spans comparable with the age of the Solar System. From these results we…
We present results examining the fate of the Trojan clouds produced in our previous work. We find that the stability of Neptunian Trojans seems to be strongly correlated to their initial post-migration orbital elements, with those objects…
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…
The Neptune Trojans are the most recently discovered population of small bodies in the Solar System. To date, only eight have been discovered, though it is thought likely that the total population at least rivals that of the asteroid belt.…