Predictions of Stellar Occultations by Irregular Satellites up to 2020
Abstract
Due to their orbital configurations, it is believed the irregular satellites of the Giant Planets were captured by their host planets during the Solar System evolution. It is important to know their physical parameters such as size, shape, albedo and composition in an attempt to access their origin. The best ground-based technique to do so is by stellar occultations.With the release of the GAIA catalog and the publication of a large database of positions of irregular satellites (Gomes-Júnior et al., 2015), the position of the stars and the ephemeris of the satellites are improved to better predict stellar occultation.The present work predicts such events for the 8 largest irregular satellites of Jupiter and the largest irregular satellite of Saturn, Phoebe, up to 2020. Another motivation is the passage of Jupiter in front of the Galatic Plane in 2019-2020 increasing a lot the number of stars to be occulted. The same happens with Saturn in 2018.
- Publication:
-
AAS/Division of Dynamical Astronomy Meeting #48
- Pub Date:
- June 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017DDA....4820508R