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An instability among the giant planets' orbits can match many aspects of the Solar System's current orbital architecture. We explore the possibility that this dynamical instability was triggered by the close passage of a star or substellar…
Because of the high eccentricities (~0.3) of two of the possible planets about the star Upsilon Andromeda, the stability of the system requires careful study. We present results of 1000 numerical simulations which explore the orbital…
The long-term dynamical future of the Sun's planets has been simulated and statistically analyzed in great detail, but most prior work considers the solar system as completely isolated, neglecting the potential influence of field star…
The dynamical stability of tightly packed exoplanetary systems remains poorly understood. While for a two-planet system a sharp stability boundary exists, numerical simulations of three and more planet systems show that they can experience…
Many of the multi-planet systems discovered to date have been notable for their compactness, with neighbouring planets closer together than any in the Solar System. Interestingly, planet-hosting stars have a wide range of ages, suggesting…
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…
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 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…
This paper explores the stability of an Earth-like planet orbiting a solar-mass star in the presence of a stellar companion using ~ 400,000 numerical integrations. Given the chaotic nature of the systems being considered, we perform a…
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…
We used recently produced Solar System ephemerides, which incorporate two years of ranging observations to the MESSENGER spacecraft, to extract the secular orbital elements for Mercury and associated uncertainties. As Mercury is in a stable…
The gravitational three-body problem is a fundamental problem in physics and has significant applications to astronomy. Three-body configurations are often considered stable as long the system is hierarchical; that is, the two orbital…
Of the solar system's four terrestrial planets, the origin of Mercury is perhaps the most mysterious. Modern numerical simulations designed to model the dynamics of terrestrial planet formation systematically fail to replicate Mercury;…
Understanding the stability of exoplanet systems is crucial for constraining planetary formation and evolution theories. We use the machine-learning stability indicator, SPOCK, to characterize the stability of 126 high-multiplicity systems…
Observations of exoplanets have revealed that systems with planets on closely-spaced orbits are common, which motivates the question "How closely can planets orbit to one another and still be dynamically-stable for very long times?". To…
The upcoming space missions, MESSENGER and BepiColombo with onboard instrumentation capable of measuring the rotational parameters stimulate the objective to reach an accurate theory of the rotational motion of Mercury. For obtaining the…
We describe an algorithm for long-term planetary orbit integrations, including the dominant post-Newtonian effects, that employs individual timesteps for each planet. The algorithm is symplectic and exhibits short-term errors that are…
In this work we revisit the problem of the dynamical stability of hierarchical triple systems with applications to circumbinary planetary orbits. We carry out more than 3 10^8 numerical simulations of planets between the size of Mercury and…
We study the dynamical stability and fates of hierarchical (in semi-major axis) two-planet systems with arbitrary eccentricities and mutual inclinations. We run a large number of long-term numerical integrations and use the Support Vector…
The orbital solutions of published multi-planet systems are not necessarily dynamically stable on timescales comparable to the lifetime of the system as a whole. For this reason, dynamical tests of the architectures of proposed exoplanetary…