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| View Original: | Hydra, Nix, Styx orbital resonance cycle.png (1496x1122) | |||
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| Keywords: Hydra, Nix, Styx orbital resonance cycle.png Pluto's moons Hydra blue Nix red and Styx black as controlled by their mutual orbital resonance The view is from the north pole of the system and all motions are counterclockwise The movements shown are actually a composite of orbital motion and orbital precession Libration is disregarded The time interval between diagrams is half of Hydra's orbital period equivalent to 0 75 Nix periods or 0 917 Styx periods Numbers in the upper right corners of diagrams indicate the number of orbits completed by each moon since the first diagram a full cycle consists of 6 Hydra orbits 9 Nix orbits and 11 Styx orbits and would be represented by a return to the first diagram The figure shows all of the conjunctions and oppositions of Nix and Hydra and of Nix and Styx but only one fifth of those between Hydra and Styx notice that there are no triple conjunctions All orbits in the Pluto system are shown to scale but sizes of moons are not The diagrams were created using Wolfram Mathematica according to the results reported in Showalter M R ; Hamilton D P 3 June 2015 Resonant interactions and chaotic rotation of Pluto ™s small moons Nature 522 7554 45 “49 doi 10 1038/nature14469 2015-06-29 own WolfmanSF other versions <gallery>Hydra Nix Styx conjunctions and oppositions cycle png All the conjunctions and oppositions per resonance cycle of the 3 moons<br> Hydra Nix Styx conjunctions cycle png All the conjunctions per resonance cycle of the 3 moons</gallery> cc-zero Uploaded with UploadWizard Moons of Pluto | ||||
