Related papers: The Changing Perception of the Solar System

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,…

The solar system started to form about 4.56 Gyr ago and despite the long intervening time span, there still exist several clues about its formation. The three major sources for this information are meteorites, the present solar system…

Over the past three decades, we have witnessed one of the great revolutions in our understanding of the cosmos - the dawn of the Exoplanet Era. Where once we knew of just one planetary system (the Solar system), we now know of thousands,…

Advances in the discovery and characterization of asteroids over the past decade have revealed an unanticipated underlying structure that points to a dramatic early history of the inner Solar System. The asteroids in the main asteroid belt…

Since the discovery of the first extra-solar planets, we are confronted with the puzzling diversity of planetary systems. Processes like planet radial migration in gas-disks and planetary orbital instabilities, often invoked to explain the…

Since the formulation of the problem by Newton, and during three centuries, astronomers and mathematicians have sought to demonstrate the stability of the Solar System. Thanks to the numerical experiments of the last two decades, we know…

This article relates two topics of central importance in modern astronomy - the discovery some fifteen years ago of the first planets around other stars (exoplanets), and the centuries-old problem of understanding the origin of our own…

Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…

There is strong evidence that the planets in the solar system evolved from a disk-shaped solar nebula ~4.56 Gyr ago. By studying young stars in various evolutionary stages, one aims at tracing back the early history of the solar system, in…

With the availability of considerably more data, we revisit the question of how special our Solar System is, compared to observed exoplanetary systems. To this goal, we employ a mathematical transformation that allows for a meaningful,…

How has the solar wind evolved to reach what it is today? In this review, I discuss the long-term evolution of the solar wind, including the evolution of observed properties that are intimately linked to the solar wind: rotation, magnetism…

The Sun has been known to rotate for more than 4 centuries, and evidence is also available through direct measurements, that almost all stars rotate. In this lecture, I will propose a review of the different physical processes associated to…

In this review, three major changes in our understanding of the early history of the Solar System are presented. 1) Early differentiation: A few recent results support the idea that protoplanet formation and differentiation occurred partly…

Most mechanisms proposed for the formation of planets are modified versions of the mechanism proposed for the solar system. Here we argue that, in terms of those planetary systems which have been observed, the case for the solar system…

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…

Our Sun and planetary system were born about 4.5 billion years ago. How did this happen and what is our heritage from these early times? This review tries to address these questions from an astrochemical point of view. On the one hand, we…

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…

The apparent regularity of the motion of the giant planets of our solar system suggested for decades that said planets formed onto orbits similar to the current ones and that nothing dramatic ever happened during their lifetime. The…

Exoplanet surveys have confirmed one of humanity's (and all teenagers') worst fears: we are weird. If our Solar System were observed with present-day Earth technology -- to put our system and exoplanets on the same footing -- Jupiter is the…

The solar luminosity in the visible changes at the 10-3 level, following an 11 years period. In X-rays, which should not be there, the amplitude varies 100000 times stronger, making their mysterious origin since the discovery in 1938 even…