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Session 33 - Comets & Asteroids.
Oral session, Wednesday, January 07
Jefferson,
Numerical integrations show that orbits in the outer asteroid belt are chaotic, with Lyapunov times that vary dramatically with the initial semimajor axis of the orbit. In earlier work we showed, in the context of a model where Jupiter was the only planet, that the orbits with the shortest Lyapunov times are chaotic because high order mean motion resonances overlap. In this contribution we show that much of the rest of the chaos seen in complete solar system models is the result of variations in the orbital elements of Jupiter forced by Saturn. These orbital variations produce sidebands to the mean motion resonances, and motion at the location in semimajor axis where the sidebands lie is chaotic.
