Resonant transport of Pluto’s minor moons enabled by a post-impact water-vapor disk
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Tuesday 9th
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Resonant transport of Pluto’s minor moons enabled by a post-impact water-vapor disk
The formation of Pluto’s satellite system was probably the result of a Giant Impact on a primordial body [Canup2005]. Impact simulations are capable of simultaneously forming an intact Charon and a compact ice-rich debris disk [Canup2011]. However, four minor moons were recently observed in the system in much wider orbits and remarkably close to N:1 mean-motion-resonances with Charon (with N=3,4,5 and 6) [Weaver+2016]. The hypothesis of resonant transport of debris as Charon’s orbit tidally expands is a natural explanation for the small moon’s orbits [Canup+2021] but transporting four bodies at once has proven to be a highly unstable process [Cheng+2014]. Here we show that a post-impact water-vapor disk, similar to the one that has recently been proposed for the formation of the moons of Uranus [Ida+2020], greatly stabilizes the resonant transport of debris through aerodynamical drag. Despite the extreme complexity of each particular resonance, we can transport the four moons to orbits very similar to the observed ones, using standard hydrodynamical parameters of the disk and tidal factors of the binary components.