Dynamically favorable hosts for submoons around Jupiter and Saturn

@misc{dahoumane2026dynamically,
  title = {{Dynamically favorable hosts for submoons around Jupiter and Saturn}},
  author = {Ryan Dahoumane and Valéry Lainey and Kevin Baillié},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.03564},
  eprint = {2609.03564},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03564},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - Dynamically favorable hosts for submoons around Jupiter and Saturn
AU  - Ryan Dahoumane
AU  - Valéry Lainey
AU  - Kevin Baillié
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/03
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.03564
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03564
AB  - The long-term stability of small bodies orbiting natural satellites (submoons) in the Solar System has been previously investigated using an analytical approximation of a three-body problem, focusing mainly on tidal forces and neglecting other perturbations. This approach suggests that submoons around most of the regular satellites in the Solar System could be stable. However, no such object has been detected to date. In this work, we extend these previous results by numerically testing the survival of submoons around a large number of satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. Our goal is to rank the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn according to how dynamically favorable they are for submoon survival over the simulated timescales. For each regular or irregular satellite considered, we performed 130 separate N-body integrations, each containing one hypothetical submoon with a different initial semimajor axis and inclination. From the 1 Myr survival fractions, we rank the satellites according to their dynamical favorability for submoon survival over the simulated timescale. We find that, after 1 Myr, the satellites with the highest survival fractions (above 30%) are Iapetus (≈ 37%), Titan (≈ 35%), Rhea (≈ 32%), Phoebe (30%), Callisto (≈ 34%), and Ganymede (30%). Rather than providing absolute probabilities for the existence of submoons, these survival fractions identify the most dynamically favorable hosts. Iapetus, Titan, Rhea, Phoebe, Callisto, and Ganymede are the most dynamically favorable submoon hosts among the tested satellites.
ER  -