The Bombardment History of the Giant Planet Satellites

Abstract

The origins of the giant planet satellites are debated, with scenarios including formation from a protoplanetary disk, sequential assembly from massive rings, and recent accretion after major satellite–satellite collisions. Here, we test their predictions by simulating outer solar system bombardment and calculating the oldest surface ages on each moon. Our crater production model assumes the projectiles originated from a massive primordial Kuiper Belt (PKB) that experienced substantial changes from collisional evolution, which transformed its size frequency distribution into a wavy shape, and Neptune’s outward migration, which ejected most PKB objects onto destabilized orbits. The latter event also triggered an instability among the giant planets some tens of Myr after the solar nebula dispersed. We find all giant planet satellites are missing their earliest crater histories, with the likely source being impact resetting events. Iapetus, Hyperion, Phoebe, and Oberon have surface ages that are a few Myr to a few tens of Myr younger than when Neptune entered the PKB (i.e., they are 4.52–4.53 Gyr old). The remaining midsized satellites of Saturn and Uranus, as well as the small satellites located between Saturn’s rings and Dione, have surfaces that are younger still by many tens to many hundreds of Myr (4.1–4.5 Gyr old). A much wider range of surface ages are found for the large moons Callisto, Ganymede, Titan, and Europa (4.1, 3.4, 1.8, and 0.18 Gyr old, respectively). At present, we favor the midsized and larger moons forming within protoplanetary disks, with the other scenarios having several challenges to overcome.