OSSOS: XIII. Fossilized Resonant Dropouts Tentatively Confirm Neptune's Migration was Grainy and Slow

TL;DR

This study analyzes Neptune's migration models by comparing their predictions with TNO observations, tentatively confirming a grainy and slow migration process, but highlights the need for deeper surveys for conclusive results.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of five Neptune migration models with observational data, emphasizing the importance of survey depth and bias correction in understanding Neptune's migration history.

Findings

Asymmetric high-q TNO distribution supports grainy slow Neptune migration

Current data is limited, preventing definitive model discrimination

Deeper surveys could distinguish between migration models

Abstract

The migration of Neptune's resonances through the proto-Kuiper belt has been imprinted in the distribution of small bodies in the outer Solar System. Here we analyze five published Neptune migration models in detail, focusing on the high pericenter distance (high-q) trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) near Neptune's 5:2 and 3:1 mean-motion resonances, because they have large resonant populations, are outside the main classical belt, and are relatively isolated from other strong resonances. We compare the observationally biased output from these dynamical models with the detected TNOs from the Outer Solar System Origins Survey, via its Survey Simulator. All of the four new OSSOS detections of high-q non-resonant TNOs are on the Sunward side of the 5:2 and 3:1 resonances. We show that even after accounting for observation biases, this asymmetric distribution cannot be drawn from a uniform distribution of TNOs at 2sigma confidence. As shown by previous work, our analysis here tentatively confirms that the dynamical model that uses grainy slow Neptune migration provides the best match to the real high-q TNO orbital data. However, due to extreme observational biases, we have very few high-q TNO discoveries with which to statistically constrain the models. Thus, this analysis provides a framework for future comparison between the output from detailed, dynamically classified Neptune migration simulations and the TNO discoveries from future well-characterized surveys. We show that a deeper survey (to a limiting r-magnitude of 26.0) with a similar survey area to OSSOS could statistically distinguish between these five Neptune migration models.