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Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…
Given the inexorable increase in the Sun's luminosity, Earth will exit the habitable zone in ~1 Gyr. There is a negligible chance that Earth's orbit will change during that time through internal Solar System dynamics. However, there is a…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing and orbital eccentricities of giant planets, can be explained if the early Solar System evolved through a dynamical instability followed by migration of planets in…
Many features of the outer solar system are replicated in numerical simulations if the giant planets undergo an orbital instability that ejects one or more ice giants. During this instability, Jupiter and Saturn's orbits diverge, crossing…
A long-term numerical integration of the classical Newtonian approximation to the planetary orbital motions of the full Solar System (sun + 8 planets), spanning 20 Gyr, was performed. The results showed no severe instability arising over…
The potential existence of a distant planet ("Planet Nine") in the Solar system has prompted a re-think about the evolution of planetary systems. As the Sun transitions from a main sequence star into a white dwarf, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus…
In about 6 Giga years our Sun will evolve into a red giant and finally end its life as a white dwarf. This stellar metamorphosis will occur to virtually all known host stars of exo-planetary systems and is therefore crucial for their final…
Mounting discoveries of extrasolar planets orbiting post-main sequence stars motivate studies aimed at understanding the fate of these planets. In the traditional "adiabatic" approximation, a secondary's eccentricity remains constant during…
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.…
The Sun will eventually lose about half of its current mass nonlinearly over several phases of post-main sequence evolution. This mass loss will cause any surviving orbiting body to increase its semimajor axis and perhaps vary its…
Classical analytic theories of the solar system indicate that it is stable, but numerical integrations suggest that it is chaotic. This disagreement is resolved by a new analytic theory. The theory shows that the chaos among the Jovian…
We examine the effects that planetary encounters have on the moon systems of ejected gas giant planets. We conduct a suite of numerical simulations of planetary systems containing three Jupiter-mass planets (with the innermost planet at 3…
Despite the discovery of thousands of exoplanets in recent years, the number of known exoplanets in star clusters remains tiny. This may be a consequence of close stellar encounters perturbing the dynamical evolution of planetary systems in…
In seven billion years, the Sun will be dead. As stars like the Sun pass from their present state to that of a dead white dwarf star, they undergo two phases of extremely high luminosity and radius -- the red giant branch and the asymptotic…
We revisit the distant future of the Sun and the solar system, based on stellar models computed with a thoroughly tested evolution code. For the solar giant stages, mass-loss by the cool (but not dust-driven) wind is considered in detail.…
We carried out an extensive analysis of the stability of the outer solar system, making use of the frequency analysis technique over short-term integrations of nearly a hundred thousand test particles, as well as a statistical analysis of…
The orbital architecture of the Solar System is thought to have been sculpted by a dynamical instability among the giant planets. During the instability a primordial outer disk of planetesimals was destabilized and ended up on…
We study the orbital evolution of the 4 giant planets of our solar system in a gas disk. Our investigation extends the previous works by Masset and Snellgrove (2001) and Morbidelli and Crida (2007, MC07), which focussed on the dynamics of…
The observed wide eccentricity distribution of extrasolar giant planets is thought to be the result of dynamical instabilities and gravitational scattering among planets. Previously, it has been assumed that the orbits in giant planet…
Although the long-term numerical integrations of planetary orbits indicate that our planetary system is dynamically stable at least +/- Gyr, the dynamics of our Solar System includes both chaotic and stable motions: the large planets…