The rings of Chariklo under close encounters with the giant planets

Abstract

The Centaur population is composed by minor bodies wandering between the giant planets and that frequently perform close gravitational encounters with these planets, which leads to a chaotic orbital evolution. Recently, the discovery of two well-defined narrow rings was announced around the Centaur 10199 Chariklo. The rings are assumed to be in the equatorial plane of Chariklo and to have circular orbits. The existence a well-defined system of rings around a body in such perturbed orbital region poses an interesting new problem. Are the rings of Chariklo stable when perturbed by close gravitational encounters with the giant planets? Our approach to address this question consisted of forward and backward numerical simulations of 729 clones of Chariklo, with similar initial orbits, for a period of 100 Myrs. We found, on average, that each clone suffers along its lifetime more than 150 close encounters with the giant planets within one Hill radius of the planet in question. We identified some extreme close encounters able to significantly disrupt or to disturb the rings of Chariklo. About 3% of the clones lose the rings and about 4% of the clones have the ring significantly disturbed. Therefore, our results show that in most of the cases (more than 90%) the close encounters with the giant planets do not affect the stability of the rings in Chariklo-like systems. Thus, if there is an efficient mechanism that creates the rings, then these structures may be common among these kinds of Centaurs.

arXiv comment11 pages. Accepted for publication in APj

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Cited by in corpus (16)

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• Centaur and giant planet crossing populations: origin and distribution
• Assessment of different formation scenarios for the ring system of (10199) Chariklo
• The Dynamical History of Chariklo and its Rings
• Simulating the Smallest Ring World of Chariklo
• The dynamics of rings around Centaurs and Trans-Neptunian Objects
• The Dynamical History Of 2060 Chiron And Its Proposed Ring System
• Investigating the formation of small Solar System objects using stellar occultations by satellites: present, future and its use to update satellite orbits
• Rings under close encounters with the giant planets: Chariklo vs Chiron
• The journey of Typhon-Echidna as a binary system through the planetary region
• Dynamics of Haumea's dust ring
• Rings of non-spherical, axisymmetric bodies
• The multichord stellar occultation by the centaur Bienor on January 11, 2019
• Gravitational disturbance on asteroidal ring systems by close encounter with a small object
• Apse-alignment in narrow-eccentric ringlets and its implications for the EPSILON-ring of Uranus and the ring system of (10199) Chariklo