N-body Simulations of Satellite Formation around Giant Planets: Origin of Orbital Configuration of the Galilean Moons

TL;DR

This study uses N-body simulations to explore the formation of Galilean-like satellite systems around giant planets, demonstrating that resonant configurations similar to the Galilean moons are a common outcome under various conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a model with an inner disk cavity that successfully reproduces the resonant and compositional features of the Galilean satellites, advancing understanding of satellite formation.

Findings

Resonant satellite configurations are robust across different disk masses and migration rates.

The presence of a disk edge naturally leads to compositional gradients.

Galilean-like systems are almost universally formed with an inner disk cavity.

Abstract

As the number of discovered extrasolar planets has been increasing, diversity of planetary systems requires studies of new formation scenarios. It is important to study satellite formation in circumplanetary disks, which is often viewed as analogous to formation of rocky planets in protoplanetary disks. We investigated satellite formation from satellitesimals around giant planets through N-body simulations that include gravitational interactions with a circumplanetary gas disk. Our main aim is to reproduce the observable properties of the Galilean satellites around Jupiter through numerical simulations, as previous N-body simulations have not explained the origin of the resonant configuration. We performed accretion simulations based on the work of Sasaki et al. (2010), in which an inner cavity is added to the model of Canup & Ward (2002, 2006). We found that several satellites are formed and captured in mutual mean motion resonances outside the disk inner edge and are stable after rapid disk gas dissipation, which explains the characteristics of the Galilean satellites. In addition, owing to the existence of the disk edge, a radial compositional gradient of the Galilean satellites can also be reproduced. An additional objective of this study is to discuss orbital properties of formed satellites for a wide range of conditions by considering large uncertainties in model parameters. Through numerical experiments and semianalytical arguments, we determined that if the inner edge of a disk is introduced, a Galilean-like configuration in which several satellites are captured into a 2:1 resonance outside the disk inner cavity is almost universal. In fact, such a configuration is produced even for a massive disk and rapid type I migration. This result implies the inevitability of a Galilean satellite formation in addition to providing theoretical predictions for extrasolar satellites.