The Origin of Chaos in the Outer Solar System
Astrophysics
2009-10-31 v1
Abstract
Classical analytic theories of the solar system indicate that it is stable, but numerical integrations suggest that it is chaotic. This disagreement is resolved by a new analytic theory. The theory shows that the chaos among the Jovian planets results from the overlap of the components of a mean motion resonance among Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and provides rough estimates of the Lyapunov time (10 million years) and the dynamical lifetime of Uranus (10^{18} years). The Jovian planets must have entered the resonance after all the gas and most of the planetesimals in the protoplanetary disk were removed.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9903277,
title = {The Origin of Chaos in the Outer Solar System},
author = {N. Murray and M. Holman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9903277},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
19 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Science