Related papers: Dynamical evolution of the Gliese 581 planetary sy…
Although the discovery of the chaotic motion of the inner planets in the solar system dates back to more than thirty years ago, the secular chaos of their orbits still dares more analytical analyses. Apart from the high-dimensional…
Planetary obliquity (axial tilt) plays an important role in regulating the climate evolution and habitability of water-covered planets. Despite the suspicion of large obliquities in several exoplanetary systems, this phenomenon remains hard…
The two innermost planets of the Proxima Centauri system are separated by just 0.02 au, inducing strong gravitational interactions between them. We assess this interaction by leveraging fast orbital stability indicators and find that…
Several concepts have been brought forward to determine where terrestrial planets are likely to remain habitable in multi-stellar environments. Isophote-based habitable zones, for instance, rely on insolation geometry to predict…
Understanding when global glaciations occur on Earth-like planets is a major challenge in climate evolution research. Most models of how greenhouse gases like CO2 evolve with time on terrestrial planets are deterministic, but the complex,…
We investigate the possibility that the large orbital eccentricity of the transiting Neptune-mass planet Gliese 436b is maintained in the face of tidal dissipation by a second planet in the system. We find that the currently observed…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing and orbital eccentricities of giant planets, can be explained if the early Solar System evolved through a dynamical instability followed by migration of planets in…
The secular evolution process, which slowly transforms the morphology of a galaxy over its lifetime, could naturally account for observed properties of the great majority of physical galaxies if both stellar and gaseous accretion processes…
Apart from being chaotic, the inner planets in the Solar System constitute an open system, as they are forced by the regular long-term motion of the outer ones. No integrals of motion can bound a priori the stochastic wanderings in their…
The large scale structure of the Solar System has been shaped by a transient dynamical instability that may have been triggered by the interaction of the giants planets with a massive primordial disk of icy debris. In this work, we…
Many of the multi-planet systems discovered to date have been notable for their compactness, with neighbouring planets closer together than any in the Solar System. Interestingly, planet-hosting stars have a wide range of ages, suggesting…
The presence of strong large-scale stable magnetic fields in a significant portion of early-type stars, white dwarfs, and neutron stars is well established. Despite this, the origins of these fields remain unresolved, with leading…
Planetary systems formed in clusters may be subject to stellar encounter flybys. Here we create a diverse range of representative planetary systems with different orbital scales and planets' masses and examine encounters between them in a…
The long-term habitability of Earth-like planets requires low orbital eccentricities. A secular perturbation from a distant stellar companion is a very important mechanism in exciting planetary eccentricities, as many of the extrasolar…
We investigate the secular dynamics of two-planet coplanar systems evolving under mutual gravitational interactions and dissipative forces. We consider two mechanisms responsible for the planetary migration: star-planet (or…
Before about 500 million years ago, most probably our planet experienced temporary snowball conditions, with continental and sea ices covering a large fraction of its surface. This points to a potential bistability of Earth's climate, that…
About two years ago, Wolszczan and Frail announced the detection of a possible planetary system consisting of two Earth-mass planets around a millisecond pulsar. It was pointed out shortly thereafter that the mutual gravitational…
Understanding the origin and long-term evolution of the Solar System is a fundamental goal of planetary science and astrophysics. This chapter describes our current understanding of the key processes that shaped our planetary system,…
A terrestrial planet in an orbit far outside of the standard habitable zone could maintain surface liquid water as a result of H2-H2 collision-induced absorption by a thick H2 atmosphere. Without a stabilizing climate feedback, however,…
Galactic globular clusters are ancient building blocks of our Galaxy. They represent a very interesting family of stellar systems in which some fundamental dynamical processes have been taking place for more than 10 Gyr, but on time scales…