I'm aware of trojans, and I have certainly discussed this possibility with colleagues. I apologize, I thought we had included the Trojans hypothesis in the paper, but you are right, we did not mention it. If all of the Trojans you mentioned were somehow in a swarm tight enough to produce one of the dips in the curve, they would have low mutual velocity, and tend to self-gravitate into planet. It's possible that the 1:1 resonance with the larger body would preclude this, but the swarm would still experience collisions over the life of the star and grind itself up into dust. So given the age of the star, this is an unlikely solution, but it's a good idea to keep thinking about. Jason On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 10:44 AM Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> wrote:
You can learn more about trojans from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_trojan It says there are over 6000 named, BUT it also says that the total number of jupiter trojans over 1 km in diameter is believed to be "over 1 million."
Also, trojan clouds exist not only for Jupiter, but also for Neptune (13 named examples) and Mars (7) -- so just in case you were doubting that multiple Jupiters could coexist all herding their own trojan clouds and all staying stably around for gigayears... don't.