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Modeling Extrasolar Trojan Asteroids In Gravitational Potentials Of Migrating Jovian-Like Planets To Inform Future Observations, Austin Hinkel
Modeling Extrasolar Trojan Asteroids In Gravitational Potentials Of Migrating Jovian-Like Planets To Inform Future Observations, Austin Hinkel
Lewis Honors College Capstone Collection
In this paper, I construct a program to map the evolution of the potential in a planet-star system where a planet with a few Jupiter masses migrates inward. Given a trojan asteroid librating around the fourth or fifth Lagrange point, the asteroid follows the evolving equipotential lines of the slowly changing potential map. As the planet and its trojan asteroids migrate inward towards the host star, the trojan asteroid librations become tighter, providing a denser “cloud” of trojan asteroids. Such a change in the density of trojan asteroids is examined with the intent to deduce the likelihood of detection via …