Irregular Satellites of the Planets: Products of Capture in the Early Solar System

By D. Jewitt, N. Haghighipour. 2007

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 difference can be traced directly to different modes of formation. Whereas the regular satellites grew by accretion within circumplanetary disks the irregular satellites were captured from initially heliocentric orbits at an early epoch. Recently, powerful survey observations have greatly increased the number of known irregular satellites, permitting a fresh look at the group properties of these objects and motivating a re-examination of the mechanisms of capture. None of the suggested mechanisms, including gas-drag, pull-down, and three-body capture, convincingly fit the group characteristics of the irregular satellites. The sources of the satellites also remain unidentified.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1003594f7846b0c0081e7e34280025ce869c4b26

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

YOUNG SOLAR SYSTEM's FIFTH GIANT PLANET? (2011, background): “To explain the observed populations of the irregular moons that are roughly similar at each planet (Jewitt & Haghighipour 2007), all planets –including Jupiter– must participate in encounters (Nesvorný et al. 2007).”
STATISTICAL STUDY OF THE EARLY SOLAR SYSTEM'S INSTABILITY WITH FOUR, FIVE, AND SIX GIANT PLANETS (2012, background): “To explain the observed populations of the irregular moons that are roughly similar at each planet (when corrected for observational incompleteness; Jewitt & Haghighipour 2007), all planets –including Jupiter– must participate in encounters with other planets (Nesvorný et al. 2007).”
Models of Jupiter's growth incorporating thermal and hydrodynamic constraints (2008, background): “…which fortuitously crossed the narrow bridge in phase space connecting them with retrograde orbits as the planet grew and those whose orbits were altered by collisions, etc.) No proposed mechanism for capture of small satellites by giant planets is fully satisfactory (Jewitt and Haghighipour 2007).”
Planet Hunters IX. KIC 8462852-where's the flux? (2015, result): “This scenario is therefore analogous to that suggested for the enigmatic exoplanet Fomalhaut b (Kalas et al. 2008; Kennedy & Wyatt 2011), which borrows from the irregular satellites seen in the Solar system (e.g. Jewitt & Haghighipour 2007; Bottke et al. 2010).”
The primordial nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (2015, background): “In fact, small (D ∼ 10 km) jovian irregular satellites have αc ≈ 2.5 (Jewitt & Haghighipour 2007), similar to that of small main belt asteroids (Sect.”