English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Open

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Insights

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Zendy Tools

Zendy Plus

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

The present-day orbit distribution of the Neptune Trojans is a powerful probeof the dynamical environment of the outer solar system during the late stagesof planet migration. In this work, I conservatively debias the inclination,eccentricity, and libration amplitude distributions of the Neptune Trojans byreducing a priori unknown discovery and follow-up survey properties to nuisanceparameters and using a likelihood-free Bayesian rejection sampler for parameterestimation. Using this survey-agnostic approach, I confirm that the NeptuneTrojans are a dynamically excited population: at $>$95% confidence, the NeptuneTrojans' inclination width must be $\sigma_i > 11^\circ$. For comparison andmotivation purposes, I also model the Jupiter Trojan orbit distributions in thesame basis and produce new estimates of their parameters (Jupiter Trojan$\sigma_i=14.4^\circ \pm 0.5^\circ$, $\sigma_{L11} = 11.8^\circ \pm 0.5^\circ$,and $\sigma_e = 0.061\pm 0.002$). The debiased inclination, librationamplitude, and eccentricity distributions of the Neptune Trojans are nominallyvery similar to those of the Jupiter Trojans. I use these new constraints toinform a suite of simulations of Neptune Trojan capture by an eccentric,rapidly-migrating Neptune from an initially dynamically-hot disk. Thesesimulations demonstrate that if migration and eccentricity-damping timescaleswere short ($\tau_a \lesssim 10$ Myr, $\tau_e \lesssim 1$ Myr), the disk thatNeptune migrated into must have been pre-heated (prior to Neptune's appearance)to a width comparable to the Neptune Trojans' extant width to produce acaptured population with an inclination distribution width consistent with thatof the observed population.

The Intrinsic Neptune Trojan Orbit Distribution: Implications for the Primordial Disk and Planet Migration