Paper detail

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

The present-day orbit distribution of the Neptune Trojans is a powerful probe of the dynamical environment of the outer solar system during the late stages of planet migration. In this work, I conservatively debias the inclination, eccentricity, and libration amplitude distributions of the Neptune Trojans by reducing a priori unknown discovery and follow-up survey properties to nuisance parameters and using a likelihood-free Bayesian rejection sampler for parameter estimation. Using this survey-agnostic approach, I confirm that the Neptune Trojans are a dynamically excited population: at $>$95% confidence, the Neptune Trojans' inclination width must be $σ_i > 11^\circ$. For comparison and motivation purposes, I also model the Jupiter Trojan orbit distributions in the same basis and produce new estimates of their parameters (Jupiter Trojan $σ_i=14.4^\circ \pm 0.5^\circ$, $σ_{L11} = 11.8^\circ \pm 0.5^\circ$, and $σ_e = 0.061\pm 0.002$). The debiased inclination, libration amplitude, and eccentricity distributions of the Neptune Trojans are nominally very similar to those of the Jupiter Trojans. I use these new constraints to inform a suite of simulations of Neptune Trojan capture by an eccentric, rapidly-migrating Neptune from an initially dynamically-hot disk. These simulations demonstrate that if migration and eccentricity-damping timescales were short ($τ_a \lesssim 10$ Myr, $τ_e \lesssim 1$ Myr), the disk that Neptune migrated into must have been pre-heated (prior to Neptune's appearance) to a width comparable to the Neptune Trojans' extant width to produce a captured population with an inclination distribution width consistent with that of the observed population.