Paper detail

Revisiting the distributions of Jupiter's irregular moons: I. physical characteristics

As the identified number of Jupiter's moons has skyrocketed to 79, some of them have been regrouped. In this work, we continue to identify the potential distributions of the physical characteristics of Jupiter's irregular moons. By using nonparametric Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, we verified more than 20 commonly used distributions and found that surprisingly, almost all the physical characteristics (i.e., the equatorial radius, equatorial circumference, circumference, volume, mass, surface gravity and escape velocity) of the moons in the Ananke and Carme groups follow log-logistic distributions. Additionally, more than half of the physical characteristics of the moons in the Pasiphae group are theoretically subject to this type of distribution. The discovery of an increasing number of Jupiter's irregular moons combined with strict analytical derivations, it is increasingly clear and possible to anticipate that the physical characteristics of most irregular moons follow log-logistic distributions.