The Doubly Librating Plutinos

Named for orbital kinship with Pluto, the Plutinos are a prominent group of Kuiper Belt objects whose orbital periods are in libration about a 3/2 ratio with Neptune’s. We investigate the long-term orbital dynamics of known Plutinos, with attention to the additional libration (or lack thereof) of their argument of perihelion, g, a well-known characteristic of Pluto’s orbit. We show that the g librators among the Plutinos cluster around an arc in the eccentricity-inclination parameter plane. This previously unreported dynamical structure is owed to a family of periodic orbits of the third kind in the restricted problem of three bodies, identified by Poincaré at the end of the 19th century. Approximately 16% of the currently known Plutinos exhibit g librations, a far greater fraction than the ratios of the associated libration frequencies. These results may offer new constraints for theoretical models of the dynamical history of the Plutinos and of the orbital migration history of the giant planets.