Related papers: Long-Term Stability of Horseshoe Orbits

The Centaur population is composed by minor bodies wandering between the giant planets and that frequently perform close gravitational encounters with these planets, which leads to a chaotic orbital evolution. Recently, the discovery of two…

Stable co-orbital motion with Uranus is vulnerable to planetary migration but temporary co-orbitals may exist today. So far only two candidates have been suggested, both moving on horseshoe orbits: 83982 Crantor (2002 GO9) and 2000 SN331.…

The focus of this work is the current distribution of asteroids in co-orbital motion with Venus, Earth and Jupiter, under a quasi-coplanar configuration and for a medium-term timescale of the order of 900 years. A co-orbital trajectory is a…

Compact planetary systems with more than two planets can undergo orbital crossings from planet-planet perturbations. The time which the system remains stable without orbital crossings has an exponential dependence on the initial orbital…

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…

It is thought that, sometime after their formation, the solar system's giant planets experienced a dynamical instability that caused their orbits to excite, diverge, and ejected one or more objects with masses comparable to the ice giants.…

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…

Discoveries of exoplanets using the radial velocity method are progressively reaching out to increasingly longer orbital periods as the duration of surveys continues to climb. The improving sensitivity to potential Jupiter analogs is…

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…

Recently the first Earth Trojan has been observed (Mainzer et al., ApJ 731) and found to be on an interesting orbit close to the Lagrange point L4 (Connors et al., Nature 475). In the present study we therefore perform a detailed…

In this paper, we investigate whether hypothetical Earth-like planets have high probability of remaining on stable orbits inside the habitable zones around the stars A and B of {\alpha} Centauri, for lengths of time compatible with the…

We present the discovery of 2013 VZ70, the first known horseshoe coorbital companion of Saturn. Observed by the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS) for 4.5 years, the orbit of 2013 VZ70 is determined to high precision, revealing that…

The three-body problem is famously chaotic, with no closed-form analytical solutions. However, hierarchical systems of three or more bodies can be stable over indefinite timescales. A system is considered hierarchical if the bodies can be…

We calculate the upper bounds of the population of theoretically stable Centaur orbits between Uranus and Neptune. These small bodies are on low-eccentricity, low-inclination orbits in two specific bands of semi-major axis, centred at…

Earth co-orbitals of the horseshoe type are interesting objects to study for practical reasons. They are relatively easy to access from our planet and that makes them attractive targets for sample return missions. Here, we show that…

HR 8799 is a four planet system that also hosts a debris disk. By numerically integrating both planets and a planetesimal disk, we find interactions between an exterior planetesimal disk and the planets can influence the lifetime of the…

We investigate the natural families of periodic orbits associated with the equilibrium configurations of the the planar restricted $1+n$ body problem for the case $2\leq n \leq 4$ equal mass satellites. Such periodic orbits can be used to…

(Abridged) We have numerically explored the stable planetary geometry for the multiple systems involved in a 2:1 mean motion resonance, and herein we mainly concentrate on the study of the HD 82943 system by employing two sets of the…

A number of Earth co-orbital asteroids experience repeated transitions between the quasi-satellite and horseshoe dynamical states. Asteroids 2001 GO2, 2002 AA29, 2003 YN107 and 2015 SO2 are well-documented cases of such a dynamical…

The process leading to the formation of the terrestrial planet remains elusive. In a previous publication, we have shown that, if the first generation of planetesimals forms in a ring at about 1 AU and the gas disk's density peaks at the…