MEGASIM: Lifetimes and Resonances of Earth Trojan Asteroids -- The Death of Primordial ETAs?

TL;DR

This study uses large-scale simulations to analyze the lifetimes and resonances of Earth Trojan Asteroids, revealing their instability and predicting their eventual disappearance within a few billion years due to planetary resonances.

Contribution

The paper presents the largest n-body simulation of ETAs, providing new insights into their stability, lifetimes, and the influence of planetary resonances on their ejection.

Findings

ETAs have short lifetimes, less than a million years.

Remaining ETAs decrease exponentially, predicting their disappearance by 2.33 Gyr.

Planetary resonances influence ETA ejections.

Abstract

We present an analysis of lifetimes and resonances of Earth Trojan Asteroids (ETAs) in the MEGASIM data set (Yeager & Golovich 2022). Trojan asteroids co-orbit the Sun with a planet but remain bound to the Lagrange points, L4 (60{\deg} leading the planet) or L5 (60{\deg} trailing). In the circular three-body approximation, the stability of a Trojan asteroid depends on the ratio of the host planet mass and the central mass. For the inner planets, the range of stability becomes increasingly small, so perturbations from the planets have made primordial Trojans rare. To date there have been just two ETAs (2010 TK7 and 2020 XL5), several Mars Trojans, and a Venus Trojan discovered. The estimated lifetimes of the known inner system Trojans are less than a million years, suggesting they are interlopers rather than members of a stable and long-lasting population. With the largest ETA n-body simulation to date, we are able to track their survival across a wide initialized parameter space. We find the remaining fraction of ETAs over time is well fit with a stretched exponential function that when extrapolated beyond our simulation run time predicts zero ETAs by 2.33 Gyr. We also show correlations between ETA ejections and the periods of the Milankovitch cycles. Though Earth's orbital dynamics dominate the instabilities of ETAs, we provide evidence that ETA ejections are linked to resonances found in the variation of the orbital elements of many, if not all of the planets.