What will become of Chariklo?

[Connect-the-Stars]

The largest known centaur between Saturn and Uranus.

It doesn't cross a gas giant's orbit, but will it be thrown out of the Solar system or have its orbit warped by a nearby Jovian? I think it gets within a few hundred million miles from Uranus, can someone explain how this link (http://home.comcast.net/~kpheider/Char.txt) proves that Chariklo is already being affected by Uranus?

Similarly, is Pluto affected by Neptune?

Chariklo's Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10199_Chariklo)

[D H]

That link doesn't prove that Chariklo is already being affected by Uranus. It shows that on a very few occasions in the future Chariklo will (or rather, might) get close to Uranus. Look at the dates. There are three close encounters in the next 5700 years. There are no significant close encounters for the next 16,800 years.

Think about it for a second: Do any of those supposed encounters 20,000+ years into the future have any meaning? JPL lists the uncertainty of the mean motion for 10199 Chariklo as 1.2608e-7 degrees/day, one sigma. This alone corresponds to a true anomaly three sigma error of 3 degrees in 22,000 years. The encounters further into the future are dubious at best.

Kevin used a Solex (http://chemistry.unina.it/~alvitagl/solex/) to do his analysis. Reading the paper at that site, Vitagliano is using a numerical integration technique out of Numerical Recipes. Stoermer's rule is over 100 years old! There are many integrators that are much, much better than Stoermer's rule.

[Connect-the-Stars]

I didn't even notice the dates, very good point. I'm a lay-person and I'd (not literally) kill to be math literate enough to understand half of what you said, but it does seem pretty far-fetched to me to believe that Uranus, the second smallest Jovian can be three times the distance between the Sun and Earth from Chariklo and still have a strong enough gravitational pull to distort Chariklo's orbit (matter of fact, way more than that according to NASA (http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=Chariklo;orb=1;view=Far), it's more like a Jupiter AU distance away, I read that it was about 200 million miles on something that was obviously wrong).

But what about the Ceres on the larger asteroids like Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea? What's your opinion on that? On the one hand they are pretty distant from each other, esp the highly inclined Pallas. But Ceres has 1/3 of the matter of the asteroid belt, and that distance seems smaller when you also take into account the fact that they're around 250 miles or more across and all about within 1 AU of each other in any of the 3 dimensions (but I guess within our 1 AU we have three large terrestrials that pose no threat to each other)...

I ask (and also about the Neptune-Pluto thing) because to me it's all pretty similar, one large body thought to distort a smaller body.