Related papers: Jumping Jupiter can explain Mercury's orbit
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…
We study the dynamics of a planet on an orbit inclined with respect to a disc. If the initial inclination of the orbit is larger than some critical value, the gravitational force exerted by the disc on the planet leads to a Kozai cycle in…
We describe the current state of knowledge about Mercury's interior structure. We review the available observational constraints, including mass, size, density, gravity field, spin state, composition, and tidal response. These data enable…
The turbulent environment from which stars form may lead to misalignment between the stellar spin and the remnant protoplanetary disk. By using hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic simulations, we demonstrate that a wide range of stellar…
The inner solar system's modern orbital architecture provides inferences into the epoch of terrestrial planet formation; a ~100 Myr time period of planet growth via collisions with planetesimals and other proto-planets. While classic…
The theory of General Relativity explaines the advance of Mercury perihelion using space curvature and the Schwartzschild metric. We demonstrate that this phenomena can also be interpreted due to the cogravitational field produced by the…
Of the over 800 exoplanets detected to date, over half are on non-circular orbits, with eccentricities as high as 0.93. Such orbits lead to time-variable stellar heating, which has implications for the planet's atmospheric dynamical regime.…
The interaction between a planet located in the inner region of a disc and the warped outer region is studied. We consider the stage of evolution after the planet has cleared-out a gap, so that the planetary orbit evolves only under the…
For many years, it was assumed that Jupiter prevented the Earth from being subject to a punishing impact regime that would greatly hinder the development of life. Here, we present the 4th in a series of studies investigating this…
The stellar spin orientation relative to the orbital planes of multiplanet systems are becoming accessible to observations. Here, we analyze and classify different types of spin-orbit evolution in compact multiplanet systems perturbed by an…
The orbital properties of the (as-yet) small population of hot Jupiters with nearby planetary companions provide valuable constraints on the past migration processes of these systems. In this work, we explore the likelihood that dynamical…
The theory of General Relativity explaines the advance of Mercury perihelion using space curvature and the Schwartzschild metric. We demonstrate that this phenomena can also be interpreted due to the cogravitational field produced by the…
We study how close-in systems such as those detected by Kepler are affected by the dynamics of bodies in the outer system. We consider two scenarios: outer systems of giant planets potentially unstable to planet--planet scattering, and wide…
We study the possibility that hot Jupiters are formed through the secular gravitational interactions between two planets in eccentric orbits with relatively low mutual inclinations ($\lesssim20^\circ$) and friction due to tides raised on…
An important class of formation theories for hot Jupiters involves the excitation of extreme orbital eccentricity (e=0.99 or even larger) followed by tidal dissipation at periastron passage that eventually circularizes the planetary orbit…
Starting with the flat space-time relativistic versions of Maxwell-Heaviside's toy model vector theory of gravity and introducing the gravitational analogues for the electromagnetic Lienard-Wiechert potentials together with the notion of a…
The origin of the high inclination of Uranus' spin-axis (Uranus' obliquity) is one of the great unanswered questions about the Solar system. Giant planets are believed to form with nearly zero obliquity, and it has been shown that the…
The present obliquity of Mercury is very low (less than 0.1 degree), which led previous studies to always adopt a nearly zero obliquity during the planet's past evolution. However, the initial orientation of Mercury's rotation axis is…
Orbits of known extrasolar planets that are located outside the tidal circularization regions of their parent stars are often substantially eccentric. By contrast, planetary orbits in our Solar System are approximately circular, reflecting…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing of the giant planets, can be explained if planets radially migrated by exchanging orbital energy and momentum with outer disk planetesimals. Neptune's…