Animations for the paper ``A Pluto-Charon Sonata: The Dynamical Architecture of the Circumbinary Satellite System'' by Scott Kenyon and Ben Bromley. The first animation is roughly 7 MB. The second is roughly 2 MB.
Click on an image to start an animation.
Feel free to view other animations on this site.
The animation illustrates the time evolution of massless tracers orbiting the Pluto-Charon binary system (large white dots) along with Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra (smaller orange dots). Although Pluto-Charon and the four small satellites are fixed for this illustration, they orbit the center of mass along with sets of massless tracers. The tracers (small blue dots) have initial prograde orbits with small eccentricity and inclination relative to the orbital plane of the Pluto-Charon binary.
The animation illustrates the time evolution of massless tracers orbiting the Pluto-Charon binary system (large white dots) along with Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra (smaller orange dots). Although Pluto-Charon and the four small satellites are fixed for this illustration, they orbit the center of mass along with sets of massless tracers. The tracers (small blue dots) have initial polar orbits with small eccentricity and an inclination of roughly 90 degrees relative to the orbital plane of Pluto-Charon.