Related papers: Long-term dynamics of the solar system inner plane…
Numerical integrations of the Solar System reveal a remarkable stability of the orbits of the inner planets over billions of years, in spite of their chaotic variations characterized by a Lyapunov time of only 5 million years and the lack…
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…
The discovery of the chaotic motion of the planets in the Solar System dates back more than 30 years. Still, no analytical theory has satisfactorily addressed the origin of chaos so far. Implementing canonical perturbation theory in the…
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…
Context: Seasonal variations and climate stability of a planet are very sensitive to the planet obliquity and its evolution. This is of particular interest for the emergence and sustainability of land-based life, but orbital and rotational…
The long-term variations in the orbit of the Earth govern the insolation on its surface and hence its climate. The use of the astronomical signal, whose imprint has been recovered in the geological records, has revolutionized the…
Many exo-solar systems discovered in the last decade consist of planets orbiting in resonant configurations and consequently, their evolution should show long-term stability. However, due to the mutual planetary interactions a multi-planet…
We investigated the dynamical stability of high-multiplicity Kepler and K2 planetary systems. Our numerical simulations find instabilities in $\sim20\%$ of the cases on a wide range of timescales (up to $5\times10^9$ orbits) and over an…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
We report on the long-term dynamical evolution of the two-planet Kepler-36 system, which we studied through numerical integrations of initial conditions that are consistent with observations of the system. The orbits are chaotic with a…
Diversity in the properties of exoplanetary systems arises, in part, from dynamical evolution that occurs after planet formation. We use numerical integrations to explore the relative role of secular and resonant dynamics in the long-term…
We present an analytical formalism to study the secular dynamics of a system consisting of N-2 planets orbiting a binary star in outer orbits. We introduce a canonical coordinate system and expand the disturbing function in terms of…
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…
We construct a secular theory of a coplanar system of N-planets not involved in strong mean motion resonances, and which are far from collision zones. Besides the point-to-point Newtonian mutual interactions, we consider the general…
I consider the dynamics of mean motion resonances between pairs of co-planar planets and derive a new integrable Hamiltonian model for planets' resonant motion. The new model generalizes previously-derived integrable Hamiltonians for…