OSSOS III - Resonant Trans-Neptunian Populations: Constraints from the first quarter of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the resonant trans-Neptunian objects detected by OSSOS, confirming population models, revealing higher-than-expected populations in certain resonances, and providing new constraints on their orbital characteristics and origins.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed characterization of resonant TNOs from OSSOS, verifying and refining population models, and constraining libration modes and inclination distributions.

Findings

The 5:2 resonance is more populated than predicted by models.

OSSOS detects low libration amplitude objects in the 3:2 resonance.

The 2:1 resonance has a colder inclination distribution than 3:2 or 5:2.

Abstract

The first two observational sky "blocks" of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS) have significantly increased the number of well-characterized observed trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) in Neptune's mean motion resonances. We describe the 31 securely resonant TNOs detected by OSSOS so far, and we use them to independently verify the resonant population models from the Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey (CFEPS; Gladman et al. 2012), with which we find broad agreement. We confirm that the 5:2 resonance is more populated than models of the outer Solar System's dynamical history predict; our minimum population estimate shows that the high eccentricity (e>0.35) portion of the resonance is at least as populous as the 2:1 and possibly as populated as the 3:2 resonance. One OSSOS block was well-suited to detecting objects trapped at low libration amplitudes in Neptune's 3:2 resonance, a population of interest in testing the origins of resonant TNOs. We detected three 3:2 objects with libration amplitudes below the cutoff modeled by CFEPS; OSSOS thus offers new constraints on this distribution. The OSSOS detections confirm that the 2:1 resonance has a dynamically colder inclination distribution than either the 3:2 or 5:2 resonances. Using the combined OSSOS and CFEPS 2:1 detections, we constrain the fraction of 2:1 objects in the symmetric mode of libration to be 0.2-0.85; we also constrain the fraction of leading vs. trailing asymmetric librators, which has been theoretically predicted to vary depending on Neptune's migration history, to be 0.05-0.8. Future OSSOS blocks will improve these constraints.