Would tidal acceleration mean doom for this system?

So we have a Super Earth of ten Earth masses, just on the threshold, and it has three Mars sized moons (so a mass ratio of 100/3, more than Saturn Vs 3 Earths). They go 40,000km, 100,000km, 250,000km in their initial semi-major axis.

Our moon is receding from the Earth by 3cm or so every year. If the first moon is receding at that rate, it will take 1 billion years to reduce its separation with the second moon by half and probably disrupt the system (the moons start at 2.5x semi-major axis separation, and experimentally 2 times is just about okay, but beyond that it starts to get dicey). However, I imagine that when the moon was closer it experienced a lot greater force from the tidal effect, so I wonder if this is realistically going to happen much much sooner than that.

Is it possible to have a lower magnitude tidal recession so the system can last 5 billion years?

posted almost 5 years ago

Axion‭

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