OSSOS. XXIII. 2013 VZ70 and the Temporary Coorbitals of the Giant Planets

Abstract

We present the discovery of 2013 VZ70, the first known horseshoe coorbital companion of Saturn. Observed by the Outer Solar System Origins Survey for 4.5 yr, the orbit of 2013 VZ70 is determined to high precision, revealing that it currently is in “horseshoe” libration with the planet. This coorbital motion will last at least thousands of years but ends ∼10 kyr from now; 2013 VZ70 is thus another example of the already-known “transient coorbital” populations of the giant planets, with this being the first known prograde example for Saturn (temporary retrograde coorbitals are known for Jupiter and Saturn). We present a theoretical steady-state model of the scattering population of trans-Neptunian origin in the giant planet region (2-34 au), including the temporary coorbital populations of the four giant planets. We expose this model to observational biases using survey simulations in order to compare the model to the real detections made by a set of well-characterized outer solar system surveys. While the observed number of coorbitals relative to the scattering population is higher than predicted, we show that the number of observed transient coorbitals of each giant planet relative to each other is consistent with a trans-Neptunian source. © 2021. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.