Related papers: Chaotic Disintegration of the Inner Solar System
We study the chaotic orbital evolution of planetary systems, focusing on secular (i.e., orbit-averaged) interactions, because these often dominate on long timescales. We first focus on the evolution of a test particle that is forced by…
In the inner solar system, the planets' orbits evolve chaotically, driven primarily by secular chaos. Mercury has a particularly chaotic orbit, and is in danger of being lost within a few billion years. Just as secular chaos is reorganizing…
Planetary systems can evolve dynamically even after the planets themselves have fully formed, and there is circumstantial evidence that most planetary systems become unstable after the disappearance of the gaseous protoplanetary disk.…
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…
We show that stability of planetary systems is intimately connected with their internal order. An arbitrary initial distribution of planets is susceptible to catastrophic events in which planets either collide or are ejected from the…
Mercury's orbit can destabilize, generally resulting in a collision with either Venus or the Sun. Chaotic evolution can cause g1 to decrease to the approximately constant value of g5 and create a resonance. Previous work has approximated…
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…
Our understanding of the Solar System has been revolutionized over the past decade by the finding that the orbits of the planets are inherently chaotic. In extreme cases, chaotic motions can change the relative positions of the planets…
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…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between multiple giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities seem…
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…
Due to the chaotic nature of the Solar System, the question of its dynamic long-term stability can only be answered in a statistical sense, e.g. based on numerical ensemble integrations of nearby orbits. Destabilization, including…
The physical basis of chaos in the solar system is now better understood: in all cases investigated so far, chaotic orbits result from overlapping resonances. Perhaps the clearest examples are found in the asteroid belt. Overlapping…
The dynamical structure of the Solar System can be explained by a period of orbital instability experienced by the giant planets. While a late instability was originally proposed to explain the Late Heavy Bombardment, recent work favors an…
The Solar System's orbital structure is thought to have been sculpted by an episode of dynamical instability among the giant planets. However, the instability trigger and timing have not been clearly established. Hydrodynamical modeling has…
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…
The chaotic behaviour of the motion of the planets in our Solar System is well established. In this work to model a hypothetical extrasolar planetary system our Solar System was modified in such a way that we replaced the Earth by a more…
The architecture and evolution of planetary systems are shaped in part by stellar flybys. Within this context, we look at stellar encounters which are too weak to immediately destabilize a planetary system but are nevertheless strong enough…
Numerical integrations of the Solar System have been carried out for decades. Their results have been used, for example, to determine whether the Solar System is chaotic, whether Mercury's orbit is stable, or to help discern Earth's climate…
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…