On the stability of dust orbits in mean motion resonances with considered perturbation from an interstellar wind

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical framework for understanding the stability of dust particle orbits in mean motion resonances affected by non-gravitational forces, including stellar wind and interstellar wind, and confirms findings with numerical simulations.

Contribution

The authors derive averaged resonant equations incorporating non-gravitational effects and analyze orbit stability, extending previous models to include interstellar wind influences.

Findings

Stationary orbits are stable in exact resonance.

No stationary orbits exist for non-exact resonances.

Analytical results agree with numerical simulations.

Abstract

Circumstellar dust particles can be captured in a mean motion resonance with a planet and simultaneously be affected by non-gravitational effects. It is possible to describe the secular variations of a particle orbit in the mean motion resonance analytically using averaged resonant equations. We derive the averaged resonant equations from the equations of motion in near-canonical form. The secular variations of the particle orbit depending on the orientation of the orbit in space are taken into account. The averaged resonant equations can be derived/confirmed also from Lagrange's planetary equations. We apply the derived theory to the case when the non-gravitational effects are the Poynting--Robertson effect, the radial stellar wind, and an interstellar wind. The analytical and numerical results obtained are in excellent agreement. We found that the types of orbits correspond to libration centers of the conservative problem. The averaged resonant equations can lead to a system of equations which hold for stationary points in a subset of resonant variables. Using this system we show analytically that for the considered non-gravitational effects, all stationary points should correspond to orbits which are stationary in interplanetary space after an averaging over a synodic period. In an exact resonance, the stationary orbits are stable. The stability is achieved by a periodic repetition of the evolution during the synodic period. Numerical solutions of this system show that there are no stationary orbits for either the exact or non-exact resonances.