Population and Size Distribution of Small Jovian Trojan Asteroids

By D. Jewitt, C. Trujillo, J. Luu. 2000

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We present a study of Jovian Trojan objects detected serendipitously during the course of a sky survey conducted at the University of Hawaii 2.2 m telescope. We used a 8192 × 8192 pixel charge-coupled device (CCD) mosaic to observe 20 deg2 at locations spread over the L4 Lagrangian swarm and reached a limiting magnitude V = 22.5 (50% of maximum detection efficiency). Ninety-three Jovian Trojans were detected with radii 2 km ≤ r ≤ 20 km (assumed visual albedo 0.04). Their differential magnitude distribution has a slope of 0.40 ± 0.05, corresponding to a power-law size distribution index 3.0 ± 0.3 (1 σ). The total number of L4 Trojans with radii ≥1 km is of order 1.6 × 105, and their combined mass (dominated by the largest objects) is ∼10-4 MEarth. The bias-corrected mean inclination is 13.°7 ± 0.°5. We also discuss the size and spatial distribution of the L4 swarm.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb3d16e3096ec878327aedbda025313960dcf699

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Citations in the corpus

25 Years of Self-Organized Criticality: Solar and Astrophysics (2014, background): “A statistical analysis yielded a differential size distribution of N(L) ∝ L−3.0±0.3 in the size range of L = 2− 30 km, and N(L) ∝ L−5.5±0.9 in the size range of L = 50− 84 km (Jewitt et al. 2000).”
The Scattered Disk as the Source of the Jupiter Family Comets (2008, background): “Jewitt et al. (2000) estimate that there are 1:6 ; 105 Trojans larger than 1 km. Dynamical studies of known Trojans by Tsiganis et al. (2005) suggest that 14% of these have orbits that are not stable over the age of the solar system.”
THE ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE DISTRIBUTION OF KUIPER BELT OBJECTS (2014, result): “The best-fit has large object slope α1 = 1.0 ± 0.2, similar to the value found by Jewitt et al. (2000).”
Irregular Satellites of the Planets: Products of Capture in the Early Solar System (2007, background): “…flatter than comparable power-law representations of the size distributions of the main-belt asteroids (q ∼3.5, with significant size-dependent variations; Bottke et al. 2005), small Jovian Trojans (q ∼3.0±0.3 for radii <20 km; Jewitt et al. 2000), or KBOs (q = 4.0+0.6−0.5, Trujillo et al. 2001).”
NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY OF TROJAN ASTEROIDS: EVIDENCE FOR TWO COMPOSITIONAL GROUPS (2008, background): “They do note that whereas stable Trojans display a bi-modal H-distribution (see also Jewitt et al. 2000), the distribution is uni-modal for unstable Trojans.”
CAPTURE OF TROJANS BY JUMPING JUPITER (2013, background): “The total population of Jupiter Trojans is estimated to be &10% of the main asteroid belt (e.g., Jewitt et al. 2000, Nakamura & Yoshida 2008).”