Population and Size Distribution of Small Jovian Trojan Asteroids

Jovian Trojan Asteroids in Sdss Moc 3 1 the Properties of Jovian Trojan Asteroids Listed in Sdss Moving Object Catalog 3

We analyze 1187 observations of about 860 unique candidate Jovian Trojan asteroids listed in the 3rd release of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Moving Object Catalog. The sample is complete at the faint end to r = 21.2 mag (apparent brightness) and H = 13.8 (absolute brightness, approximately corresponding to 10 km diameter). A subset of 297 detections of previously known Trojans were used to d...

Stability of the Trojan asteroids

Origin and Evolution of Trojan Asteroids

The regions around the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points of Jupiter are populated by two large swarms of asteroids called the Trojans. They may be as numerous as the main-belt asteroids and their dynamics is peculiar, involving a 1:1 resonance with Jupiter. Their origin probably dates back to the formation of Jupiter: the Trojan precursors were planetesimals orbiting close to the growing planet. Diff...

Effective stability of the Trojan asteroids

We study the spatial circular restricted problem of three bodies in the light of Nekhoroshev theory of stability over large time intervals. We consider in particular the Sun-Jupiter model and the Trojan asteroids in the neighborhood of the Lagrangian point L4. We find a region of effective stability around the point L4 such that if the initial point of an orbit is inside this region the orbit i...

Fraction of Contact Binary Trojan Asteroids

We present the results of an optical lightcurve survey of 114 Jovian Trojan asteroids conducted to determine the fraction of contact binaries. Sparse-sampling was used to assess the photometric range of the asteroids and those showing the largest ranges were targeted for detailed follow-up observations. This survey led to the discovery of two Trojan asteroids, (17365) and (29314) displaying lar...