Irregular Fixation II: The orbits of irregular satellites

TL;DR

This paper develops a semi-analytic method using the Brown Hamiltonian to characterize the orbits of irregular satellites, identifying librating satellites and providing insights into their dynamical behavior and history.

Contribution

It introduces a novel formalism and criterion for predicting libration in irregular satellite orbits, validated with N-body simulations and applied to identify new librating satellites.

Findings

Most librating satellites are prograde.

13 satellites found to librate, including 5 newly identified.

The Brown Hamiltonian effectively describes satellite phase portraits.

Abstract

Irregular satellites (IS) are believed to have been captured during the Solar system's dynamical history and provide clues for the Solar system's formation and evolution. IS occupy a large fraction of the Hill sphere of their host planet and their orbits are highly perturbed by the Sun. We use a novel formalism developed in paper I to characterise their orbits in terms of an effective secular Hamiltonian (the Brown Hamiltonian) that accounts for their large orbital separations. We find that prograde satellites generally follow the Brown Hamiltonian, while retrograde satellites (which extend further) deviate more significantly. Nevertheless, the phase portrait is much better described by the Brown Hamiltonian for all satellites. We construct a semi-analytic criterion that predicts the librating orbit based on the effective energy due to the Brown Hamiltonian. We also check our results with highly accurate N-body integrations of satellite orbits, where initial conditions are loaded directly from the updated ephemeris from the NASA Horizons database. Although the retrograde librating orbits occupy more area in the parameter space, the vast majority of librating IS are prograde. Using our method we find $13$ librating satellites, $8$ of them previously known to librate, and the rest shown to librate for the first time. Further observations of existing and new satellites could shed more light on the dynamical history of the Solar system and satellite formation and test our results.