Dynamic portrait of the region occupied by the Hungaria Asteroids: The influence of Mars

TL;DR

This study maps the complex dynamical region of Hungaria asteroids, highlighting Mars's significant influence on their stability and boundaries, and clarifies the role of secular resonances in this context.

Contribution

It provides a detailed dynamical portrait of the Hungaria asteroid region, emphasizing Mars's role and challenging previous assumptions about secular resonances.

Findings

Mars significantly influences the stability boundaries of Hungaria asteroids.

A small stable region contains the Hungaria asteroids.

Secular resonance from perihelion precession is not the main limiting factor.

Abstract

The region occupied by the Hungaria asteroids has a high dynamical complexity. In this paper, we analyse the main dynamic structures and their influence on the known asteroids through the construction of maps of initial conditions. We evolve a set of test particles placed on a perfectly rectangular grid of initial conditions during 3 Myr under the gravitational influence of the Sun and eight planets, from Mercury to Neptune. Moreover, we use the method MEGNO in order to obtain a complete dynamical portrait of the region. A comparison of our maps with the distribution of real objects allows us to detect the main dynamical mechanisms acting in the domain under study such as mean-motion and secular resonances. Our main results is the existence of a small area inside a stable region where are placed the Hungaria asteroids. We found that the influence of Mars has an important role for the dynamic structure of the region, defining the limits for this population of asteroids. Our result is in agreement with previous studies, which have indicated the importance of the eccentricity of Mars for the stability of Hungaria asteroids. However, we found that the secular resonance resulting from the precession of perihelion due to a coupling with that of Jupiter proposed as limit for the Hungaria region could not be determinant for this population of asteroids.