Scatter, bias, and chaos of satellite orbits in triaxial dark matter haloes

Abstract The pericentric distances of satellite galaxies govern their tidal stripping, quenching, and survival, yet their orbits are almost universally computed in spherical host haloes, whereas dark matter haloes are generically triaxial. We quantify, orbit by orbit, the error this simplification incurs. We integrate 106 satellites, drawn from a cosmological infall distribution, in static NFW hosts of systematically varying triaxiality at fixed mass profile. Triaxiality leaves the population medians of pericentre, apocentre, and orbital period essentially unchanged. Instead, successive pericentres of an individual orbit scatter by 5–23% depending on host shape, irrespective of orbital energy; the minimum pericentre distance reached within a Hubble time shrinks systematically by up to 21%, enhancing the peak tidal mass loss. This triaxiality-driven orbital dephasing is overwhelmingly regular rather than chaotic; chaotic satellite orbits are common and dominate the near-centre pericentric passages in strongly flattened hosts, but diverge on time-scales far exceeding the Hubble time. Satellite orbits spherically reconstructed via direct backward integration in a truly triaxial host diverge by a tenth of the virial radius within 2 − −4 Gyr, with comparable uncertainties sourced separately by the unconstrained shape of the host and by its unknown absolute orientation. For the Milky Way dwarf Triangulum II, the unknown halo shape and orientation alone spread the inferred pericentre by ∼50%, five times its reported uncertainty and more than ten times the LMC-induced shift, and bias it by 6–70%. This host-shape uncertainty can dominate satellite orbital error budgets and should be incorporated in future inferences.