Resonant Structure of the Outer Asteroid Belt

An analysis of ordered and chaotic regions of motion in the outer asteroid belt has shown that once the eccentricity of Jupiter is introduced the chaotic regions of the circular model are quite easily depleted. This suggests that also objects in neighbouring regions must be strongly perturbed. Therefore it is not surprising that many outer belt asteroids have been reported in the literature as resonant or anyway dynamically protected. By using the planar elliptic restricted 3-body model we have investigated the motion of outer belt asteroids which had not been suspected to librate. We find 3 cases of ϖ libration and 11 cases of e, ϖ coupling that can be explained within the theory of secular resonances. It is thus established that in the outer belt only resonant and dynamically protected asteroids can have lifetimes of the same order as the age of the Solar System.