Structures of secular resonances for inner test particles in hierarchical planetary systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complex secular resonance structures of inner test particles in hierarchical planetary systems using octupole-level approximation, revealing how octupole terms influence resonance dynamics and chaos.

Contribution

It provides a non-perturbative analysis of secular resonances, showing how octupole effects alter phase space structures and resonance behavior in hierarchical systems.

Findings

Kozai resonance is present only when octupole terms are absent.

Increasing octupole contribution leads to more chaos and disappearance of Kozai resonance.

Stable libration zones are qualitatively similar across different octupole strengths.

Abstract

In this study, dynamics of secular resonances for inner test particles are investigated under the octupole-level approximation by taking non-perturbative approaches. In practice, webs of the major secular resonances are produced by identifying families of stable periodic orbits and the associated stable libration zones are obtained by analysing Poincar\'e surfaces of section. By taking different values of the factor $\epsilon$ ($\epsilon$ measures the contribution of octupole terms), the influences of the octupole-order terms upon the dynamical structures are evaluated. Under the condition of $\epsilon = 0$ (no octupole-order contribution), the dynamical model is totally integrable and there is only Kozai resonance arising in the phase space. When the factor $\epsilon$ is different from zero, the dynamical structure in the phase space becomes complicated due to varieties of secular resonances appearing. Numerical results further indicate that (a) distributions of libration centres and stable libration zones remain qualitatively similar with different values of $\epsilon$, (b) Kozai resonance disappears due to the chaotic motion in the low-eccentricity region, and (c) the chaotic area arising in the low-eccentricity region increases with the factor $\epsilon$. Secular resonances are the source of many important dynamical phenomena, such as chaos, orbit alignment and orbit flipping, and thus the results presented in this work could be useful to understand the secular dynamics for those high-eccentricity and/or high-inclination objects in hierarchical planetary systems.