Trojan capture by terrestrial planets

TL;DR

This study investigates how terrestrial planets like Venus, Earth, and Mars capture asteroids into Trojan orbits, revealing higher capture efficiency but mostly short-term stability due to chaotic dynamics.

Contribution

The paper provides a numerical analysis of capture efficiency and stability of Trojan asteroids around terrestrial planets, highlighting the transient nature of these captures without dissipative forces.

Findings

Higher capture efficiency for inner Solar System planets.

Most captured Trojans are not long-term stable.

Chaotic behavior causes temporary captures and Lagrange point jumping.

Abstract

The paper is devoted to investigate the capture of asteroids by Venus, Earth and Mars into the 1:1 mean motion resonance especially into Trojan orbits. Current theoretical studies predict that Trojan asteroids are a frequent by-product of the planet formation. This is not only the case for the outer giant planets, but also for the terrestrial planets in the inner Solar System. By using numerical integrations, we investigated the capture efficiency and the stability of the captured objects. We found out that the capture efficiency is larger for the planets in the inner Solar System compared to the outer ones, but most of the captured Trojan asteroids are not long term stable. This temporary captures caused by chaotic behaviour of the objects were investigated without any dissipative forces. They show an interesting dynamical behaviour of mixing like jumping from one Lagrange point to the other one.