Size Distribution of Small Jupiter Trojans in the L5 Swarm*

Abstract

Abstract We present an analysis of survey observations of the trailing L5 Jupiter Trojan swarm using the wide-field Hyper Suprime-Cam CCD camera on the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope. We detected 189 L5 Trojans from our survey that covered about 15 deg2 of sky with a detection limit of m r = 24.1 mag, and selected an unbiased sample consisting of 87 objects with absolute magnitude 14 ≲ H r ≤ 17 corresponding to diameter 2 km ≲ D ≲ 10 km for analysis of size distribution. We fit their differential magnitude distribution to a single-slope power law with an index α = 0.37 ± 0.01, which corresponds to a cumulative size distribution with an index of b = 1.85 ± 0.05. Combining our results with data for known asteroids, we obtained the size distribution of L5 Jupiter Trojans over the entire size range for 9 ≲ H V ≤ 17, and found that the size distributions of the L4 and L5 swarms agree well with each other for a wide range of sizes. This is consistent with the scenario that asteroids in the two swarms originated from the same primordial population. Based on the above results, the ratio of the total number of asteroids with D ≥ 2 km in the two swarms is estimated to be N L4/N L5 = 1.40 ± 0.15, and the total number of L5 Jupiter Trojans with D ≥ 1 km is estimated to be 1.1 × 105 by extrapolating the obtained distribution.