Possible origin of the Saturn satellite, Phoebe

Abstract

The orbit of the outermost Saturn's irregular moon, Phoebe, suggests that it was captured by Saturn rather than formed in situ. The Cassini-Huygens mission results allowed to find that Phoebe's composition is similar to that derived for the outer solar system bodies and very different from the composition of the Saturn regular satellites. In this paper we present new results suggesting that Phoebe could be a component of a binary centaur captured by Saturn during a three-body gravitational encounter.

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