Related papers: Miller's instability, microchaos and the short-ter…
The orbits of stars in galaxies are generically chaotic: the chaotic behavior arises in part from the intrinsically grainy nature of a potential that is composed of point masses. Even if the potential is assumed to be smooth, however,…
To improve our understanding of orbital instabilities in compact planetary systems, we compare suites of $N$-body simulations against numerical integrations of simplified dynamical models. We show that, surprisingly, dynamical models that…
The solar system's dynamical state can be explained by an orbital instability among the giant planets. A recent model has proposed that the giant planet instability happened during terrestrial planet formation. This scenario has been shown…
The dynamical stability of tightly packed exoplanetary systems remains poorly understood. While for a two-planet system a sharp stability boundary exists, numerical simulations of three and more planet systems show that they can experience…
Planetary systems with more than two bodies will experience orbital crossings at a time related to the initial orbital separations of the planets. After a crossing, the system enters a period of chaotic evolution ending in the reshaping of…
Numerous previous studies have investigated the phenomenon wherein initially spherical N-body systems are distorted to triaxial shapes. We report on an investigation of a previously described orbital instability that should oppose…
One of the fundamental aspects of statistical behaviour in many-body systems is exponential divergence of neighbouring orbits, which is often discussed in terms of Liapounov exponents. Here we study this topic for the classical…
The origin of spiral patterns in galaxies is still not fully understood. Similar features also develop readily in N-body simulations of isolated cool, collisionless disks, yet even here the mechanism has yet to be explained. In this series…
Everything you ever wanted to know about what has come to be known as ``chaotic mixing:'' This paper describes the evolution of localised ensembles of initial conditions in 2- and 3-D time-independent potentials which admit both regular and…
The phase space trajectories of many body systems charateristic of simple fluids are highly unstable. We quantify this instability by a set of Lyapunov exponents, which are the rates of exponential divergence, or convergence, of initial…
The formation of the solar system's giant planets predated the ultimate epoch of massive impacts that concluded the process of terrestrial planet formation. Following their formation, the giant planets' orbits evolved through an episode of…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between several giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities would…
This paper continues a numerical investigation of orbits evolved in `frozen,' time-independent N-body realisations of smooth time-independent density distributions corresponding to both integrable and nonintegrable potentials, allowing for…
Meso-scale turbulence was originally observed experimentally in various suspensions of swimming bacteria, as well as in the collective motion of active colloids. The corresponding large-scale dynamical patterns were reproduced in a simple…
We describe the dynamics of a stream of equally spaced macroscopic particles in orbit around a central body (e.g. a planet or star). A co-orbital configuration of small bodies may be subject to gravitational instability, which takes the…
The planetary restricted three-body problem (RTBP) is considered. The primary mass M is much more than another masses mj, i=1..N, which revolve around M. The massless probe particle m moves on elliptic orbit, is perturbed by mj. It is well…
A large sample of planet-planet scattering events for three planet systems with different orbital separations and masses is analyzed with a multiple regression model. The dependence of the time for the onset of instability on the masses of…
We investigate the evolution of phase space close to complex unstable periodic orbits in two galactic type potentials. They represent characteristic morphological types of disc galaxies, namely barred and normal (non-barred) spiral…
On timescales that greatly exceed an orbital period, typical planetary orbits evolve in a stochastic yet stable fashion. On even longer timescales, however, planetary orbits can spontaneously transition from bounded to unbound chaotic…
We investigate the orbital dynamics of four-planet systems consisting of Earth-mass planets on initially-circular, coplanar orbits around a star of one solar mass. In our simulations, the innermost planet's semimajor axis is set at 1 AU,…