Dynamical capture in the Pluto-Charon system

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility that the progenitors of the small satellites of Pluto got captured in the Pluto-Charon system from the massive heliocentric planetesimal disk in which Pluto was originally embedded into. We find that, if the dynamical excitation of the disk is small, temporary capture in the Pluto-Charon system can occur with non-negligible probability, due to the dynamical perturbations exerted by the binary nature of the Pluto-Charon pair. However, the captured objects remain on very elliptic orbits and the typical capture time is only 100 years. In order to explain the origin of the small satellites of Pluto, we conjecture that some of these objects got disrupted during their Pluto-bound phase by a collision with a planetesimal of the disk. This could have generated a debris disk, which damped under internal collisional evolution, until turning itself into an accretional disk that could form small satellites on circular orbits, co-planar with Charon. Unfortunately, we find that objects large enough to carry a sufficient amount of mass to generate the small satellites of Pluto have collisional lifetimes orders of magnitude longer than the capture time. Thus, this scenario cannot explain the origin of the small satellites of Pluto, which remains elusive.

References in corpus (4)

• Origin of the Structure of the Kuiper Belt during a Dynamical Instability in the Orbits of Uranus and Neptune
• Full Numerical Simulations of Catastrophic Small Body Collisions
• Masses of Nix and Hydra
• Circumbinary Chaos: Using Pluto's Newest Moon to Constrain the Masses of Nix & Hydra

Cited by in corpus (9)

• The Formation of Pluto's Low Mass Satellites
• Fomalhaut b as a Cloud of Dust: Testing Aspects of Planet Formation Theory
• On the Origin of Pluto's Small Satellites by Resonant Transport
• Tidal Dissipation in Dual-Body, Highly Eccentric, and Non-synchronously Rotating Systems: Applications to Pluto-Charon and the Exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e
• The Contraction/Expansion History of Charon with implication for its Planetary Scale Tectonic Belt
• A Pluto-Charon Concerto: An Impact on Charon as the Origin of the Small Satellites
• A Pluto--Charon Sonata: Dynamical Limits on the Masses of the Small Satellites
• Past and present dynamics of the circumbinary moons in the Pluto-Charon system
• A Deep Search for Additional Satellites around the Dwarf Planet Haumea