A Pluto–Charon Sonata: The Dynamical Architecture of the Circumbinary Satellite System
A Pluto–Charon Sonata: The Dynamical Architecture of the Circumbinary Satellite System
Using a large suite of n-body simulations, we explore the discovery space for new satellites in the Pluto-Charon system. For the adopted masses and orbits of the known satellites, there are few stable prograde or polar orbits with semimajor axes $a \lesssim 1.1~a_H$, where $a_H$ is the semimajor axis of …