Co-orbital Asteroids as the Source of Venus's Zodiacal Dust Ring

Abstract

Photometry from the Helios and STEREO spacecraft revealed regions of enhanced sky surface-brightness suggesting a narrow circumsolar ring of dust associated with Venus's orbit. We model this phenomenon by integrating the orbits of 10,000,000+ dust particles subject to gravitational and non-gravitational forces, considering several different kinds of plausible dust sources. We find that only particles from a hypothetical population of Venus co-orbital asteroids can produce enough signal in a narrow ring to match the observations. Previous works had suggested such objects would be dynamically unstable. However, we re-examined the stability of asteroids in 1:1 resonance with Venus and found that ~8% should survive for the age of the solar system, enough to supply the observed ring.

arXiv comment18 pages, 7 figures, Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Parker Solar Probe: Four Years of Discoveries at Solar Cycle Minimum
• The Near-Sun Dust Environment: Initial Observations from Parker Solar Probe
• A Twilight Search for Atiras, Vatiras and Co-orbital Asteroids: Preliminary Results
• Tidal disruption of near-Earth asteroids during close encounters with terrestrial planets
• Horseshoe Co-orbitals of Earth: Current Population and New Candidates
• A Deep and Wide Twilight Survey for Asteroids Interior to Earth and Venus
• Helios spacecraft data revisited: Detection of cometary meteoroid trails by in-situ dust impacts
• An attempt to build a dynamical catalog of Solar System co-orbitals
• Effects of neighbouring planets on the formation of resonant dust rings in the inner Solar System
• Alpha-Meteoroids then and now: Unearthing an overlooked micrometeoroid population
• Dynamics of charged dust in the orbit of Venus
• Modeling Saturn's D68 clumps as a co-orbital satellite system
• Tadpole type motion of charged dust in the Lagrange problem with planet Jupiter
• Trojan asteroids and co-orbital dust ring of Venus