Related papers: The Fate of Debris in the Pluto-Charon System
Using a suite of numerical calculations, we consider the long-term evolution of circumbinary debris from the Pluto-Charon giant impact. Initially, these solids have large eccentricity and pericenters near Charon's orbit. On time scales of…
Pluto's system of 5 known satellites are in a puzzling orbital configuration. Each of the four small satellites are on low-eccentricity and low-inclination orbits situated near a mean motion resonance with the largest satellite Charon. The…
The Pluto-Charon system provides a broad variety of constraints on planetary formation, composition, chemistry, and evolution. Pluto was the first body to be discovered in what is now known as the Kuiper belt, its orbit ultimately becoming…
Motivated by the New Horizons mission, we consider how Pluto's small satellites -- currently Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra -- grow in debris from the giant impact that forms the Pluto-Charon binary. After the impact, Pluto and Charon…
We consider a scenario where the small satellites of Pluto and Charon grew within a disk of debris from an impact between Charon and a trans-Neptunian Object (TNO). After Charon's orbital motion boosts the debris into a disk-like structure,…
A giant collision is believed to be at the origin of the Pluto-Charon system. As a result, the initial orbit and spins after impact may have substantially differed from those observed today. More precisely, the distance at periapse may have…
We consider the formation of satellites around the Pluto-Charon binary. An early collision between the two partners likely produced the binary and a narrow ring of debris, out of which arose the moons Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. How the…
Current theory considers two options for the formation of the Pluto-Charon binary (Canup 2005, 2011; Desch 2015). In the `hit-and-run' model, a lower mass projectile barely hits the more massive Pluto, kicks up some debris, and remains…
Existence of subsurface oceans on the satellites of the giant planets and Trans-Neptunian objects has been predicted for some time. Oceans on icy worlds exert a considerable influence on the dynamics of the ice-ocean system and, because of…
In 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto and its moon Charon, providing the first clear look at the surface of Charon. New Horizons images revealed an ancient surface, a large, intricate canyon system, and many fractures, among…
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 Pluto-Charon binary system is the best-studied representative of the binary Kuiper-belt population. Its origins are vital to understanding the formation of other Kupier-belt objects (KBO) and binaries, and the evolution of the outer…
The Pluto-Charon (PC) pair is usually thought of as a binary in the dual synchronous state, which is the endpoint of its tidal evolution. The discovery of the small circumbinary moons, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra, placed close to the…
Debris disks are thought to be sculptured by neighboring planets. The same is true for the Edgeworth-Kuiper debris disk, yet no direct observational evidence for signatures of giant planets in the Kuiper belt dust distribution has been…
The goal of this chapter is to review hypotheses for the origin of the Pluto system in light of observational constraints that have been considerably refined over the 85-year interval between the discovery of Pluto and its exploration by…
The Pluto system is an archetype for the multitude of icy dwarf planets and accompanying satellite systems that populate the vast volume of the solar system beyond Neptune. New Horizons' exploration of Pluto and its five moons gave us a…
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 Pluto-Charon system, likely formed from an impact, has reached the endpoint of its tidal evolution. During its evolution into the dual-synchronous state, the equilibrium tidal figures of Pluto and Charon would have also evolved as…
The dwarf planet Pluto is known to host an extended system of five co-planar satellites. Previous studies have explored the formation and evolution of the system in isolation, neglecting perturbative effects by the Sun. Here we show that…
Context. The orbits of the four small moons in the Pluto-Charon system, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra, are circumbinary, as the former form a binary dwarf planet. Consequently, the orbit of each one of them is characterized by a number of…