Related papers: Is planetary chaos related to evolutionary (phenot…
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…
Globally disruptive events include asteroid/comet impacts, large igneous provinces and glaciations, all of which have been considered as contributors to mass extinctions. Understanding the overall relationship between the timings of the…
We present N-body simulations of resonant planets with inclined orbits that show chaotically evolving eccentricities and inclinations that can persist for at least 10 Gyr. A wide range of behavior is possible, from fast, low amplitude…
The formation rate of luminous galaxies seems to be roughly constant from z~2 to z~4 from the recent observations of Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) (Steidel et al 1999). The abundance of luminous quasars, on the other hand, appears to drop off…
The time-averaged Lyapunov exponents support a mechanistic description of the chaos generated in and by nonlinear dynamical systems. The exponents are ordered from largest to smallest with the largest one describing the exponential growth…
We examine to what extent the tempo and mode of environmental fluctuations matter for the growth of structured populations. The models are switching, linear ordinary differential equations $x'(t)=A(\sigma(\omega t))x(t)$ where…
Reconstructions of the paleoclimate indicate that ancient climatic fluctuations on Earth are often correlated with variations in its orbital elements. However, the chaos inherent in the solar system's orbital evolution prevents numerical…
Major discrepancies have been noted for some time between fossil ages and molecular divergence dates for a variety of taxa. Recently, systematic trends within avian clades have been uncovered. The trends show that the disparity is much…
A phenomenological model is presented for the quantitative description of individual solar cycles' features, such as onset, intensity, evolution, in terms of the number of M and X-class solar flares. The main elements of the model are the…
We study a series of $N-$body simulations representing elliptical galaxies with central masses. Starting from two different systems with smooth centres, which have initially a triaxial configuration and are in equilibrium, we insert to them…
The Lyapunov exponent characterizes an exponential growth rate of the difference of nearby orbits. A positive Lyapunov exponent is a manifestation of chaos. Here, we propose the Lyapunov pair, which is based on the generalized Lyapunov…
Time-dependent distribution of the global extinction of megafauna is compared with the growth of human population. There is no correlation between the two processes. Furthermore, the size of human population and its growth rate were far too…
The orbital parameters of the observed extrasolar planets differ strongly from those of our own solar system. The differences include planets with high masses, small semi-major axis and large eccentricities. We performed numerical…
We demonstrate the presence of chaos in stochastic simulations that are widely used to study biodiversity in nature. The investigation deals with a set of three distinct species that evolve according to the standard rules of mobility,…
The scaling behavior of the maximal Lyapunov exponent in chaotic systems with time-delayed feedback is investigated. For large delay times it has been shown that the delay-dependence of the exponent allows a distinction between strong and…
We study a lattice model of a multi-species prey-predator system. Numerical results show that for a small mutation rate the model develops irregular long-period oscillatory behavior with sizeable changes in a number of species. The…
We consider spatiotemporal chaotic systems for which spatial correlation functions decay substantially over a length scale xi (the spatial correlation length) that is small compared to the system size L. Numerical simulations suggest that…
The habitability of planets in binary star systems depends not only on the radiation environment created by the two stars, but also on the perturbations to planetary orbits and rotation produced by the gravitational field of the binary and…
We investigate the long time stability of the Sun-Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus system by considering the planar, secular model. Our method may be considered as an extension of Lagrange's theory for the secular motions. Indeed, concerning the…
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…