Trapping Time of Resonant Orbits in Presence of Poynting - Robertson Drag

Abstract

AbstractWe study numerically the competition between the Poynting-Robertson drag and the gravitational interaction of grains with Jupiter near orbital resonances. The computations are based on the plane elliptic restricted three body problem. Numerical investigations show that the grains always cross the resonance region without any oscillation, except in the special case where the grains were initially inside the resonance. Such grains are temporarily trapped, then due to the drag they are ejected out of the resonance. The trapping time of a particle turns out to be much more important in the 3/2 and 2/1 commensurabilities than in the others.A numerical exploration of numerous orbits for different initial conditions and different sizes of grains has been performed. The trapping time appears to be closely connected to the size of the librator-type orbits regions; it increases with the initial eccentricity of the orbit, and is also proportional to the radius and the density of the particle.