Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2010
Abstract
The known irregular satellites of the giant planets may have been dynamically captured during a violent reshuffling event of the giant planets 3.9 billion years ago that led to the clearing of an enormous disk of comet-like objects. A critical problem with this idea, however, is that the size distribution of the Trojan asteroids and other related populations do not look at all like the irregular satellites.
Here we use numerical codes to investigate whether collisional evolution between the irregular satellites over the last 3.9 Gyr is sufficient to explain this difference.