Lifetimes of an Exomoon Orbiting a Jupiter-Like Planet in a Double Star System with the Mass of the Sun

Abstract

The search for life outside Earth has been a popular topic for a long time in the scientific literature, but it gained more possibilities with the discovery of planets around other stars besides our Sun. In this sense, similarly to what happens in our Solar System, moons of planets sometimes offer good conditions for life if stable orbits for those moons exist. Thus, the present paper analyzes a system composed of a moon (with the mass of the Earth) orbiting a planet (with the mass of Jupiter), which is orbiting a double star system (whose total mass is equal to the mass of the Sun). It is an important topic because there is a large proportion of double stars in the universe. The initial conditions are given by a symmetric configuration of two circular orbits. Although this symmetry is broken due to the four body dynamics, the conditions in which the moon remains bound with the planet are investigated. The stability of the system is given by the survival of the orbit of the moon for an integration time of the order of 10,000 revolutions of the satellite around its mother planet. The regions of stable, unstable, and collision orbits are mapped, and empirical linear equations that separate those regions are obtained from the maps.

Keywords

• exomoons
• exoplanets
• habitability zone
• celestial mechanics
• planetary evolution