Related papers: Formation and evolution of Pluto's small satellite…

In the near-Earth asteroid population, binary and triple systems have been discovered with mutual orbits that have significant eccentricities as well as large semi-major axes. All known systems with eccentric orbits and all widely-separated…

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has revealed the complex geology of Pluto and Charon. Pluto's encounter hemisphere shows ongoing surface geological activity centered on a vast basin containing a thick layer of volatile ices that appears to…

The history of the outer solar system is intrinsically related to the Giant Planets migration. A massive disk of material within a radius of 30~au was scattered during the planetary migration, creating different dynamic populations in the…

The origin of the regular satellites ties directly to planetary formation in that the satellites form in gas and dust disks around the giant planets and may be viewed as mini-solar systems, involving a number of closely related underlying…

The discovery that the centaur (10199) Chariklo possesses a ring system opens questions about their origin. We here asses the plausibility of different scenarios for the origin of the observed ring system. We first consider the possibility…

Planetary rings are the only nearby astrophysical disks, and the only disks that have been investigated by spacecraft. Although there are significant differences between rings and other disks, chiefly the large planet/ring mass ratio that…

Plutinos are Kuiper-belt objects that share the 3:2 Neptune resonance with Pluto. The long-term stability of Plutino orbits depends on their eccentricity. Plutinos with eccentricities close to Pluto (fractional eccentricity difference…

The majority of the discovered transiting circumbinary planets are located very near the innermost stable orbits permitted, raising questions about the origins of planets in such perturbed environments. Most favored formation scenarios…

All four giant planets in the Solar system possess irregular satellites, characterized by large, highly eccentric and/or inclined orbits that are distinct from the nearly circular, uninclined orbits of the regular satellites. This…

Both Pluto and its satellite Charon have rotation rates synchronous with their orbital mean motion. This is the theoretical end point of tidal evolution where transfer of angular momentum has ceased. Here we follow Pluto's tidal evolution…

Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…

We numerically investigate the orbital dynamics of a spacecraft, or a comet, or an asteroid in the Pluto-Charon system in a scattering region around Charon using the planar circular restricted three-body problem. The test particle can move…

The Capture Theory gives planet production through a tidal interaction between a condensed star and a diffuse protostar within a dense embedded cluster. Initial extensive and highly eccentric planetary orbits round-off and decay in a…

Hydrodynamic simulations of a giant impact to proto-Uranus indicated that such an impact could tilt its rotational axis and produce a circumplanetary debris disk beyond the corotation radius of Uranus. However, whether Uranian satellites…

We present new astrometry of Pluto's three satellites from images taken of the Pluto system during 2002-3 with the High Resolution Camera (HRC) mode of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. The…

The origin of rings around giant planets remains elusive. Saturn's rings are massive and made of 90-95% of water ice. In contrast, the much less massive rings of Uranus and Neptune are dark and likely to have higher rock fraction. Here we…

We investigate the problem of the typical rotation states of the small planetary satellites from the viewpoint of the dynamical stability of their rotation. We show that the majority of the discovered satellites with unknown rotation…

How do galaxies move relative to one another? While we can examine the motion of dark matter subhalos around their hosts in simulations of structure formation, determining the orbits of satellites around their parent galaxies from…

The origin of Mars's small moons, Phobos and Deimos, remains unknown. They are typically thought either to be captured asteroids or to have accreted from a debris disk produced by a giant impact. Here, we present an alternative scenario…

While numerous planetary and asteroid satellites show evidence for non-trivial rotation states, none are as emblematic as Hyperion, which has long been held as the most striking example of chaotic spin-orbit evolution in the Solar System.…