OSSOS III—RESONANT TRANS-NEPTUNIAN POPULATIONS: CONSTRAINTS FROM THE FIRST QUARTER OF THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM ORIGINS SURVEY

Abstract

ABSTRACT The first two observational sky “blocks” of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS) have significantly increased the number of well characterized observed trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) in Neptune's mean motion resonances. We describe the 31 securely resonant TNOs detected by OSSOS so far, and we use them to independently verify the resonant population models from the Canada–France Ecliptic Plane Survey (CFEPS), with which we find broad agreement. We confirm that the 5:2 resonance is more populated than models of the outer solar system's dynamical history predict; our minimum population estimate shows that the high-eccentricity (e > 0.35) portion of the resonance is at least as populous as the 2:1 and possibly as populated as the 3:2 resonance. One OSSOS block was well suited for detecting objects trapped at low libration amplitudes in Neptune's 3:2 resonance, a population of interest in testing the origins of resonant TNOs. We detected three 3:2 objects with libration amplitudes below the cutoff modeled by CFEPS; OSSOS thus offers new constraints on this distribution. The OSSOS detections confirm that the 2:1 resonance has a dynamically colder inclination distribution than either the 3:2 or 5:2 resonances. Using the combined OSSOS and CFEPS 2:1 detections, we constrain the fraction of 2:1 objects in the symmetric mode of libration to 0.2–0.85; we also constrain the fraction of asymmetric librators in the leading island, which has been theoretically predicted to vary depending on Neptune's migration history, to be 0.05–0.8. Future OSSOS blocks will improve these constraints.