3,024 research outputs found
On the origin of the Trojan asteroids: Effects of Jupiter's mass accretion and radial migration
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 three-body problem and assume small Trojan libration amplitudes.
Employing an adiabatic invariant calculation, we show that Jupiter's
thirty-fold growth from a core to its present mass causes the
libration amplitudes of Trojan asteroids to shrink by a factor of about 2.5 to
of their original size. The calculation also shows that Jupiter's
radial migration has comparatively little effect on the Trojans; inward
migration from 6.2 to 5.2 AU causes an increase in Trojan libration amplitudes
of . In each case, the area enclosed by small tadpole orbits, if made
dimensionless by using Jupiter's semimajor axis, is approximately conserved.
Similar adiabatic invariant calculations for inclined and eccentric Trojans
show that Jupiter's mass growth leaves the asteroid's eccentricities and
inclinations essentially unchanged, while one AU of inward migration causes an
increase in both of these quantities by . Numerical integrations
confirm and extend these analytic results. We demonstrate that our predictions
remain valid for Trojans with small libration amplitudes even when the
asteroids have low, butComment: Submitted to Icarus - 13 Fig
Debris about asteroids: Where and how much?
We summarize several recent findings on the size and shape of the region within which material can stably orbit an asteroid. If the asteroid (with assumed density 2.38 g/cu cm) circles the Sun at 2.55 AU, co-planar prograde material will remain trapped whenever started on unperturbed circular orbits at less than about 220 R(sub A) (asteroid radii); co-planar retrograde particles are stable out twice as far. Our 3-D stability surface, which encloses several hundred numerically calculated orbits that start with various inclinations, is shaped like a sphere with its top and bottom sliced off; its dimensions scale like the Hill radius =(mu/3)(exp 1/3)R, where mu is the asteroid-to-solar mass ratio and R is the asteroid's orbital radius. If the asteroid moves along an elliptical orbit, a fairly reliable indicator of the dimensions of the hazard zone is the size of its Hill sphere at the orbit's pericenter. Grains with radii less than a few mm will be lost through the action of radiation forces which can induce escape or cause collisions with the asteroid on times scales of a few years; interplanetary micrometeoroids produce collisional break-up of these particles in approximately 10(exp 4) yrs. The effects of Jupiter and of asteroids that pass close to the target asteroid allow particles to diffuse from the system, again shrinking the hazard zone. None of the considered sources-primordial formation, debris spalled off the asteroid during micrometeoroid impact, captured interplanetary particles, feeder satellites, etc., seem capable of densely populating distant orbits from the asteroid. No certain detections of debris clouds or of binary asteroids have been made. Thus, it seems highly unlikely that a spacecraft fly-by targeted at 100 R(sub A) from the asteroid over its orbital pole would encounter any material
Three-Body Capture of Irregular Satellites: Application to Jupiter
We investigate a new theory of the origin of the irregular satellites of the
giant planets: capture of one member of a ~100-km binary asteroid after tidal
disruption. The energy loss from disruption is sufficient for capture, but it
cannot deliver the bodies directly to the observed orbits of the irregular
satellites. Instead, the long-lived capture orbits subsequently evolve inward
due to interactions with a tenuous circumplanetary gas disk.
We focus on the capture by Jupiter, which, due to its large mass, provides
the most stringent test of our model. We investigate the possible fates of
disrupted bodies, the differences between prograde and retrograde captures, and
the effects of Callisto on captured objects. We make an impulse approximation
and discuss how it allows us to generalize capture results from equal-mass
binaries to binaries with arbitrary mass ratios.
We find that at Jupiter, binaries offer an increase of a factor of ~10 in the
capture rate of 100-km objects as compared to single bodies, for objects
separated by tens of radii that approach the planet on relatively low-energy
trajectories. These bodies are at risk of collision with Callisto, but may be
preserved by gas drag if their pericenters are raised quickly enough. We
conclude that our mechanism is as capable of producing large irregular
satellites as previous suggestions, and it avoids several problems faced by
alternative models.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, submitted to Icaru
Three-Body Encounters of Black Holes in Globular Clusters
Evidence has been mounting for the existence of black holes with masses from
10^2 to 10^4 M_Solar associated with stellar clusters. Such intermediate-mass
black holes (IMBHs) will encounter other black holes in the dense cores of
these clusters. The binaries produced in these interactions will be perturbed
by other objects as well thus changing the orbital characteristics of the
binaries. These binaries and their subsequent mergers due to gravitational
radiation are important sources of gravitational waves. We present the results
of numerical simulations of high mass ratio encounters, which help clarify the
interactions of intermediate-mass black holes in globular clusters and help
determine what types of detectable gravitational wave signatures are likely.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures to appear in the proceedings of The Astrophysics
of Gravitational Wave Sources, College Park, MD, 24-26 April 200
Binary Encounters With Supermassive Black Holes: Zero-Eccentricity LISA Events
Current simulations of the rate at which stellar-mass compact objects merge
with supermassive black holes (called extreme mass ratio inspirals, or EMRIs)
focus on two-body capture by emission of gravitational radiation. The
gravitational wave signal of such events will likely involve a significant
eccentricity in the sensitivity range of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
(LISA). We show that tidal separation of stellar-mass compact object binaries
by supermassive black holes will instead produce events whose eccentricity is
nearly zero in the LISA band. Compared to two-body capture events, tidal
separations have a high cross section and result in orbits that have a large
pericenter and small apocenter. Therefore, the rate of interactions per binary
is high and the resulting systems are very unlikely to be perturbed by other
stars into nearly radial plunges. Depending on the fraction of compact objects
that are in binaries within a few parsecs of the center, the rate of
low-eccentricity LISA events could be comparable to or larger than the rate of
high-eccentricity events.Comment: Final accepted version: ApJ Letters 2005, 631, L11
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