Search for L5 Earth Trojans with DECam
Abstract
Most of the major planets in the Solar system support populations of co-orbiting bodies, known as Trojans, at their L4 and L5 Lagrange points. In contrast, Earth has only one known co-orbiting companion. This paper presents the results from a search for Earth Trojans (ETs) using the DECam instrument on the Blanco Telescope at CTIO. This search found no additional Trojans in spite of greater coverage compared to previous surveys of the L5 point. Therefore, the main result of this work is to place the most stringent constraints to date on the population of ETs. These constraints depend on assumptions regarding the underlying population properties, especially the slope of the magnitude distribution (which in turn depends on the size and albedo distributions of the objects). For standard assumptions, we calculate upper limits to a 90 per cent confidence limit on the L5 population of N_(ET) < 1 for magnitude H < 15.5, N_(ET) = 60–85 for H < 19.7, and N_(ET) = 97 for H = 20.4. This latter magnitude limit corresponds to Trojans ∼300 m in size for albedo 0.15. At H = 19.7, these upper limits are consistent with previous L4 ET constraints and significantly improve L5 constraints.
Additional Information
© 2020 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model). Received: 30 April 2019; Revision received: 17 December 2019; Accepted: 19 December 2019; Published: 28 January 2020. This material is based upon work supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX17AF21G issued through the Solar System Observations Planetary Astronomy Program. This work is partially funded by Michigan Space Grant Consortium, National Aeronautics and Space Administration grant #NNX15AJ20H. LM, JCB, and SJH are supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Grant No. DGE 1256260. RM acknowledges support from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NExSS; grant NNX15AD94G). Based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory, NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. These observations were taken under NOAO 2018A-0177, Alex Parker et al. This research has made use of data and/or services provided by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. We thank the referee for helpful and constructive comments, which improved this paper. We would like to thank Hsing Wen Lin and Tali Khain for their useful comments on this paper.Attached Files
Published - staa232.pdf
Accepted Version - 2001.08229.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC8051149
- Eprint ID
- 102122
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200326-092846214
- NNX17AF21G
- NASA
- Michigan Space Grant Consortium
- NNX15AJ20H
- NASA
- DGE-1256260
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- NNX15AD94G
- NASA
- Created
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2020-03-27Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-07-20Created from EPrint's last_modified field