Irregular fixation – II. The orbits of irregular satellites

Abstract

ABSTRACT Irregular satellites (ISs) are believed to have been captured during the Solar system’s dynamical history and provide clues for the Solar system’s formation and evolution. ISs 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 characterize 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-analytical 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 data base. Although the retrograde librating orbits occupy more area in the parameter space, the vast majority of librating ISs 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.