Related papers: General relativistic precession and the long-term …
Mercury's orbit can destabilize, generally resulting in a collision with either Venus or the Sun. Chaotic evolution can cause g1 to decrease to the approximately constant value of g5 and create a resonance. Previous work has approximated…
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 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…
A statistical analysis is performed over more than 1001 different integrations of the secular equations of the Solar system over 5 Gyr. With this secular system, the probability of the eccentricity of Mercury to reach 0.6 in 5 Gyr is about…
Pairs of planets in a system may end up close to their host star on eccentric orbits as a consequence of planet planet scattering, Kozai or secular migration. In this scenario, general relativity and secular perturbations have comparable…
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 long-term stability of the Solar System is an issue of significant scientific and philosophical interest. The mechanism leading to instability is Mercury's eccentricity being pumped up so high that Mercury either collides with Venus or…
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…
Although the discovery of the chaotic motion of the inner planets in the solar system dates back to more than thirty years ago, the secular chaos of their orbits still dares more analytical analyses. Apart from the high-dimensional…
Both General Relativistic (GR) precession and the Lidov-Kozai mechanism, separately, are known to play an important role in the orbital evolution of solar system bodies. Previous works have studied these two mechanisms independently in…
Most direct N-body integrations of planetary systems use a symplectic integrator with a fixed timestep. A large timestep is desirable in order to speed up the numerical simulations. However, simulations yield unphysical results if the…
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…
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…
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…
In this article, we proceed to study convection as a possible factor of episodic accretion in protoplanetary disks. Within the model presented in Article~I, the accretion history is analyzed at different rates and areas of matter inflow…
Mercury's eccentricity is chaotic and can increase so much that collisions with Venus or the Sun become possible (Laskar, 1989, 1990, 1994, 2008, Batygin & Laughlin, 2008, Laskar & Gastineau, 2009). This chaotic behavior results from an…
Multi-planetary systems are prevalent in our Galaxy. The long-term stability of such systems may be disrupted if a distant inclined companion excites the eccentricity and inclination of the inner planets via the eccentric Kozai-Lidov…
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…
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 present an attempt to reconcile the solar tachocline glitch, a thin layer immediately beneath the convection zone in which the seismically inferred sound speed in the Sun exceeds corresponding values in standard solar models, with a…