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Register a new userApsidal asymmetric-alignment of Jupiter Trojans
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The most distant Kuiper belt objects exhibit the clustering in their orbits, and this anomalous architecture could be caused by Planet 9 with large eccentricity and high inclination. We then suppose that the orbital clustering of minor planets may be observed somewhere else in the solar system. In this paper, we consider the over 7000 Jupiter Trojans from the Minor Planet Center, and find that they are clustered in the longitude of perihelion $varpi$, around the locations $varpi_{mbox{{J}}}+60^{circ}$ and $varpi_{mbox{{J}}}-60^{circ}$ ($varpi_{mbox{{J}}}$ is the longitude of perihelion of Jupiter) for the L4 and L5 swarms, respectively. Then we build a Hamiltonian system to describe the associated dynamical aspects for the co-orbital motion. The phase space displays the existence of the apsidally aligned islands of libration centered on $Deltavarpi=varpi-varpi_{mbox{{J}}}approxpm60^{circ}$, for the Trojan-like orbits with eccentricities $e<0.1$. Through a detailed analysis, we have shown that the observed Jupiter Trojans with proper eccentricities $e_p<0.1$ spend most of their time in the range of $|Deltavarpi|=0-120^{circ}$, while the more eccentric ones with $e_p>0.1$ are too few to affect the orbital clustering within this $Deltavarpi$ range for the entire Trojan population. Our numerical results further prove that, even starting from a uniform $Deltavarpi$ distribution, the apsidal alignment of simulated Trojans similar to the observation can appear on the order of the age of the solar system. We conclude that the apsidal asymmetric-alignment of Jupiter Trojans is robust, and this new finding can be helpful to design the survey strategy in the future.
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The Eurybates family is a compact core inside the Menelaus clan, located in the L4 swarm of Jupiter Trojans. Fornasier et al. (2007) found that this family exhibits a peculiar abundance of spectrally flat objects, similar to Chiron-like Centaurs and C-type main belt asteroids. On the basis of the visible spectra available in literature, Eurybates familys members seemed to be good candidates for having on their surfaces water/water ice or aqueous altered materials. To improve our knowledge of the surface composition of this peculiar family, we carried out an observational campaign at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), obtaining near-infrared spectra of 7 members. Our data show a surprisingly absence of any spectral feature referable to the presence of water, ices or aqueous altered materials on the surface of the observed objects. Models of the surface composition are attempted, evidencing that amorphous carbon seems to dominate the surface composition of the observed bodies and some amount of silicates (olivine) could be present.
Rotation periods of 53 small (diameters $2 < D < 40$ km) Jupiter Trojans (JTs) were derived using the high-cadence light curves obtained by the FOSSIL phase I survey, a Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam intensive program. These are the first reported periods measured for JTs with $D < 10$ km. We found a lower limit of the rotation period near 4 hr, instead of the previously published result of 5 hr (Ryan et al. 2017; Szabo et al. 2017, 2020) found for larger JTs. Assuming a rubble-pile structure for JTs, a bulk density of 0.9 gcm$^{-3}$ is required to withstand this spin rate limit, consistent with the value $0.8-1.0$ gcm$^{-3}$ (Marchis et al. 2006; Mueller et al. 2010; Buie et al. 2015; Berthier et al. 2020) derived from the binary JT system, (617) Patroclus-Menoetius 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 calculate the escape rate from each Lagrange point, and construct dynamical maps of permanence time in different regions of the phase space. Fictitious asteroids in L4 and L5 show no significant difference, showing almost identical dynamical maps and escape rates. For real Trojans, however, we found that approximately 23% o f the members of the leading swarm escaped after 4.5 Gyrs, while this number increased to 28.3% for L5. This implies that the asymmetry between the two populations increases with time, indicating that it may have been smaller at the time of formation/capture of these asteroids. Nevertheless, the difference in chaotic diffusion cannot, in itself, account for the current observed asymmetry (~40%), and must be primarily primordial and characteristic of the capture mechanism of the Trojans. Finally, we calculate new proper elements for all the numbered Trojans using the semi-analytical approach of Beauge and Roig (2001), and compare the results with the numerical estimations by Brov{z} and Rosehnal (2011). For asteroids that were already numbered in 2011, both methods yield very similar results, while significant differences were found for those bodies that became numbered after 2011.
We present the first-ever rotationally resolved spectroscopic investigation of (624) Hektor and (911) Agamemnon, the two largest Jupiter Trojans. The visible and near-infrared spectra that we have obtained at the TNG telescope (La Palma, Spain) do not show any feature or hints of heterogeneity. In particular we found no hints of water-related absorptions. No cometary activity was detected down to ~23.5 R-mag/arcsec2 based on the complementary photometric data. We estimated upper limits on the dust production rates of Hektor and Agamemnon to be ~30 kg/s and ~24 kg/s, respectively. We modelled complete visible and near-infrared spectra of our targets using the Shkuratov formalism, to define the upper limit to the presence of water ice and more in general to constrain their surface composition. For both objects, successful models include amorphous carbon, magnesium-rich pyroxene and kerogen, with an upper limit to the amount of water ice of a few percent.
With the growing numbers of asteroids being discovered, identifying an observationally complete sample is essential for statistical analyses and for informing theoretical models of the dynamical evolution of the solar system. We present an easily implemented method of estimating the empirical observational completeness in absolute magnitude, H_lim, as a function of semi-major axis. Our method requires fewer assumptions and decisions to be made in its application, making results more transportable and reproducible amongst studies that implement it, as well as scalable to much larger datasets of asteroids expected in the next decade with the Vera C.~Rubin Observatorys Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Using the values of H_lim(a) determined at high resolution in semimajor axis, a, we demonstrate that the observationally complete sample size of the main belt asteroids is larger by more than a factor of 2 compared to using a conservative single value of H_lim, an approach often adopted in previous studies. Additionally, by fitting a simple, physically motivated model of H_lim(a) to 7e5 objects in the Minor Planet Database, our model reveals statistically significant deviations between the main belt and the asteroid populations beyond the main belt (Hungarias, Hildas and Trojans), suggesting potential demographic differences, such as in their size, eccentricity or inclination distributions.
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