CAPTURE OF TROJANS BY JUMPING JUPITER

By D. Nesvorný, David Vokrouhlický, A. Morbidelli. 2013

163 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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, and its dispersal during planet migration. Here, we tested a possibility that the Trojans were captured during the early dynamical instability among the outer planets (aka the Nice model), when the semimajor axis of Jupiter was changing as a result of scattering encounters with an ice giant. The capture occurs in this model when Jupiter's orbit and its Lagrange points become radially displaced in a scattering event and fall into a region populated by planetesimals (that previously evolved from their natal transplanetary disk to ∼5 AU during the instability). Our numerical simulations of the new capture model, hereafter jump capture, satisfactorily reproduce the orbital distribution of the Trojans and their total mass. The jump capture is potentially capable of explaining the observed asymmetry in the number of leading and trailing Trojans. We find that the capture probability is (6–8) × 10−7 for each particle in the original transplanetary disk, implying that the disk contained (3–4) × 107 planetesimals with absolute magnitude H < 9 (corresponding to diameter D = 80 km for a 7% albedo). The disk mass inferred from this work, Mdisk ∼ 14–28 MEarth, is consistent with the mass deduced from recent dynamical simulations of the planetary instability.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b8975f1368585bf0262e04ee638d647b5814a9ea

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Citations in the corpus

Origin and Evolution of Short-period Comets (2017, methodology): “This is because the Trojan implantation efficiency from the original disk is well-determined (Nesvorný et al. 2013; see also Morbidelli et al. 2005) and because the size distribution of Trojans is well characterized from observations (e.g., Wong & Brown 2015, Yoshida et al. 2017).”
The timeline of the lunar bombardment: Revisited (2018, methodology): “e asteroids destabilized by the giant planet instability. The green curve in Fig. 3 shows the crater densities produced by comets destabilized from the trans-Neptunian region, from the simulations of Nesvorny et al., 2013). Because the time of the instability is unknown a priori, both the black and ”
THE ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE DISTRIBUTION OF KUIPER BELT OBJECTS (2014, unknown): “The Nice model predicts that the Trojans of Jupiter were captured from an original trans-Neptunian disk, during a phase of orbital instability of the giant planets (Morbidelli et al. 2005; Nesvorný et al. 2013).”
EVIDENCE FOR SLOW MIGRATION OF NEPTUNE FROM THE INCLINATION DISTRIBUTION OF KUIPER BELT OBJECTS (2015, unknown): “Also, scaling from Jupiter Trojans, there should have been (3– ´4) 107 planetesimals with absolute magnitude <H 9 in the original disk (Nesvorný et al. 2013).”
PROBING FOR EXOPLANETS HIDING IN DUSTY DEBRIS DISKS: DISK IMAGING, CHARACTERIZATION, AND EXPLORATION WITH HST/STIS MULTI-ROLL CORONAGRAPHY (2014, background): “…of our solar system, Jupiter is thought to have wrought considerable destruction in the early evolution of the asteroid belt (Bottke et al. 2005; Nesvorný et al. 2013), scattering volatilerich planetesimals toward the inner solar system that may have contributed significant water to, and…”
The primordial nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (2015, result): “We note that this model has 3.0 × 107 TNOs with D ≥ 80 km, consistent with the (3–4)× 107 bodies of this size needed to populate the Jupiter Trojan swarms (Nesvorný et al. 2013).”
The Compositional Structure of the Asteroid Belt (2015, background): “…of the giant planets has been found to provide ideal dyanamical pathways to capture the Trojan asteroids at Jupiter (Morbidelli et al., 2005, Nesvorny et al., 2013), capture the irregular satellites of the giant planets (Nesvorny et al., 2014), implant D- and P-type asteroids from the…”