An interstellar origin for Jupiter’s retrograde co-orbital asteroid

Fathi Namouni, Maria Helena Moreira Morais
(Submitted on 23 May 2018)

Asteroid (514107) 2015 BZ509 was discovered recently in Jupiter’s co-orbital region with a retrograde motion around the Sun. The known chaotic dynamics of the outer Solar System have so far precluded the identification of its origin. Here, we perform a high-resolution statistical search for stable orbits and show that asteroid (514107) 2015 BZ509 has been in its current orbital state since the formation of the Solar System. This result indicates that (514107) 2015 BZ509 was captured from the interstellar medium 4.5 billion years in the past as planet formation models cannot produce such a primordial large-inclination orbit with the planets on nearly-coplanar orbits interacting with a coplanar debris disk that must produce the low-inclination small-body reservoirs of the Solar System such as the asteroid and Kuiper belts. This result also implies that more extrasolar asteroids are currently present in the Solar System on nearly-polar orbits.

Comments:    Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters
Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
DOI:    10.1093/mnrasl/sly057
Cite as:    arXiv:1805.09013 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1805.09013v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Fathi Namouni 
[v1] Wed, 23 May 2018 08:36:41 GMT (341kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09013