On the Origin of Pluto's Minor Moons, Nix and Hydra

Abstract

How did Pluto's recently discovered minor moons form? Ward and Canup propose an elegant solution in which Nix and Hydra formed in the collision that produced Charon, then were caught into corotation resonances with Charon, and finally were transported to their current location as Charon migrated outwards. We show with numerical integrations that, if Charon's eccentricity is judiciously chosen, this scenario works beautifully for either Nix or Hydra. However, it cannot work for both Nix and Hydra simultaneously. To transport Nix, Charon's eccentricity must satisfy e_C< 0.024; otherwise, the second order Lindblad resonance at 4:1 overlaps with the corotation resonance, leading to chaos. To transport Hydra, e_C > 0.7 R_p/a_C > 0.04; otherwise migration would be faster than libration, and Hydra would slip out of resonance. These two restrictions conflict. Having ruled out this scenario, we suggest an alternative: that many small bodies were captured from the nebular disk, and they were responsible for forming, migrating and damping Nix and Hydra. If this is true, small moons could be common around large Kuiper belt objects.