Three-Body Capture of Irregular Satellites

Details Three-Body Capture of Irregular Satellites Three-Body Capture of Irregular Satellites

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.0704m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #07.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.491

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

We examine the capture of irregular satellites via three-body encounters between binary asteroids and Jupiter. Our approach allows for capture from a pair of 100 km objects through two sequential steps: 1) capture to a very distant orbit, and 2) weak orbital decay over a long timescale. The advantage of this mechanism is that capture is achieved almost immediately, while the orbital evolution can take place very slowly. This is in contrast to pull-down or gas drag capture, where the energy change is gradual and, if strong enough to capture a satellite, must cease soon afterwards to prevent collision with the planet. Because the orbital evolution is decoupled from the capture process, our mechanism does not require an especially large impulsive change to the speed during capture, and hence small binary objects are a viable source for irregular satellites.
Our four-body simulations include binaries of various characteristics, Jupiter, and the Sun. The binaries approach the planet on low-speed trajectories, the prevalence of which we are currently investigating. We find that Jupiter can significantly perturb the orbits of the binary components before they separate, at times even resulting in collisions between the two bodies. We will discuss the effects of Callisto and gas drag on the survival and evolution of both prograde and retrograde capture orbits.
We gratefully acknowledge support from the NASA Origins program.

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