Chaotic zones around rotating small bodies

Abstract

Small bodies of the Solar system, like asteroids, trans-Neptunian objects, cometary nuclei, planetary satellites, with diameters smaller than one thousand kilometers usually have irregular shapes, often resembling dumb-bells, or contact binaries. The spinning of such a gravitating dumb-bell creates around it a zone of chaotic orbits. We determine its extent analytically and numerically. We find that the chaotic zone swells significantly if the rotation rate is decreased, in particular, the zone swells more than twice if the rotation rate is decreased ten times with respect to the "centrifugal breakup" threshold. We illustrate the properties of the chaotic orbital zones in examples of the global orbital dynamics about asteroid 243 Ida (which has a moon, Dactyl, orbiting near the edge of the chaotic zone) and asteroid 25143 Itokawa.

14 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal

References in corpus (6)

• Chaotic zones around gravitating binaries
• Obliquity evolution of the minor satellites of Pluto and Charon
• Spin-Spin Coupling in the Solar System
• Dark matter chaos in the Solar System
• Symplectic map description of Halley's comet dynamics
• Chaotic enhancement of dark matter density in binary systems

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• (130) Elektra Delta -- on the stability of the new third moonlet
• The Onset of Chaos in Permanently Deformed Binaries from Spin-Orbit and Spin-Spin Coupling