Co-orbital Asteroids as the Source of Venus's Zodiacal Dust Ring
arXiv:1904.12404 · doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ab0827
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.
18 pages, 7 figures, Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters
References in corpus (2)
Cited by in corpus (13)
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