Size Distribution of Small Jupiter Trojans in the L5 Swarm

TL;DR

This study analyzes the size distribution of small Jupiter Trojans in the L5 swarm using Subaru Telescope data, revealing a power-law distribution and a ratio of L4 to L5 Trojans around 1.4, suggesting a common origin.

Contribution

First detailed size distribution analysis of small L5 Jupiter Trojans combining new survey data with existing data, confirming similar distributions for L4 and L5 swarms.

Findings

Power-law size distribution with index 0.37 for magnitude 14<H_r<17

L4 and L5 swarms have similar size distributions across sizes

Estimated total L5 Trojans with D > 1 km is about 110,000

Abstract

We present an analysis of survey observations of the trailing L5 Jupiter Trojan swarm using the wide-field Hyper Suprime-Cam CCD camera on the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope. We detected 189 L5 Trojans from our survey that covered about 15 deg^2 of sky with a detection limit of m_r = 24.1 mag, and selected an unbiased sample consisting of 87 objects with absolute magnitude 14 < H_r < 17 corresponding to diameter 2 km < D < 10 km for analysis of size distribution. We fit their differential magnitude distribution to a single-slope power-law with an index \alpha = 0.37 +- 0.01, which corresponds to a cumulative size distribution with an index of b = 1.85 +- 0.05. Combining our results with data for known asteroids, we obtained the size distribution of L5 Jupiter Trojans over the entire size range for 9 < H_V < 17, and found that the size distributions of the L4 and L5 swarms agree well with each other for a wide range of sizes. This is consistent with the scenario that asteroids in the two swarms originated from the same primordial population. Based on the above results, the ratio of the total number of asteroids with D > 2 km in the two swarms is estimated to be N_L4/N_L5=1.40 +- 0.15, and the total number of L_5 Jupiter Trojans with D > 1 km is estimated to be 1.1 x 10^5 by extrapolating the obtained distribution.