Related papers: On the Dynamical Stability of the Solar System
Many features of the outer solar system are replicated in numerical simulations if the giant planets undergo an orbital instability that ejects one or more ice giants. During this instability, Jupiter and Saturn's orbits diverge, crossing…
The motion of two planets around a Sun-like star under the combined effects of mutual interaction and tidal dissipation is investigated. The secular behaviour of the system is analyzed using two different approaches. First, we solve the…
The orbital solutions of published multi-planet systems are not necessarily dynamically stable on timescales comparable to the lifetime of the system as a whole. For this reason, dynamical tests of the architectures of proposed exoplanetary…
It is known since the seminal study of Laskar (1989) that the inner planetary system is chaotic with respect to its orbits and even escapes are not impossible, although in time scales of billions of years. The aim of this investigation is…
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…
Of the solar system's four terrestrial planets, the origin of Mercury is perhaps the most mysterious. Modern numerical simulations designed to model the dynamics of terrestrial planet formation systematically fail to replicate Mercury;…
We study the effect of a massive planetesimal disk on the dynamical stability of the outer planets assuming, as has been suggested recently, that these were initially locked in a compact and multiresonant configuration as a result of…
We used recently produced Solar System ephemerides, which incorporate two years of ranging observations to the MESSENGER spacecraft, to extract the secular orbital elements for Mercury and associated uncertainties. As Mercury is in a stable…
The long-term evolution of the outer Solar System is subject to the influence of the giant planets, however, perturbations from other massive bodies located in the region imprint secular signatures, that are discernible in long-term…
The discovery of multi-planet extrasolar systems has kindled interest in using their orbital evolution as a probe of planet formation. Accurate descriptions of planetary orbits identify systems which could hide additional planets or be in a…
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 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 exoplanets are discovered in binary star systems in internal or in circumbinary orbits. Whether the planet can be habitable or not depends on the possibility to maintain liquid water on its surface, and therefore on the luminosity of…
Advances in computing power and numerical methodologies over the past several decades sparked a prolific output of dynamical investigations of the late stages of terrestrial planet formation. Among other peculiar inner solar system…
Because of the high eccentricities (~0.3) of two of the possible planets about the star Upsilon Andromeda, the stability of the system requires careful study. We present results of 1000 numerical simulations which explore the orbital…
We present results of numerical simulations which examine the dynamical stability of known planetary systems, a star with two or more planets. First we vary the initial conditions of each system based on observational data. We then…
Mercury's eccentricity is chaotic and can increase so much that collisions with Venus or the Sun become possible (Laskar, 1989, 1990, 1994, 2008, Batygin & Laughlin, 2008, Laskar & Gastineau, 2009). This chaotic behavior results from an…
Multiple analytical and empirical stability criteria have been derived in the literature for two planet systems. But, the dependence of the stability limit on the initial mutual inclination between the inner and outer orbits is not well…
Studying the orbital stability of multi-planet systems is essential to understand planet formation, estimate the stable time of an observed planetary system, and advance population synthesis models. Although previous studies have primarily…
We find an interesting fact that fictitious retrograde co-orbitals of Saturn, or small bodies inside the retrograde 1:1 resonance with Saturn, are highly unstable in our numerical simulations. It is shown that in the presence of Jupiter,…