Related papers: Mercury's chaotic secular evolution as a subdiffus…
The orbit of Mercury has large values of eccentricity and inclination that cannot be easily explained if this planet formed on a circular and coplanar orbit. Here, we study the evolution of Mercury's orbit during the instability related to…
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…
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…
On long enough timescales, chaotic diffusion has the potential to significantly alter the appearance of a dynamical system. The solar system is no exception: diffusive processes take part in the transportation of small bodies and provide…
Numerical integrations of the Solar System have been carried out for decades. Their results have been used, for example, to determine whether the Solar System is chaotic, whether Mercury's orbit is stable, or to help discern Earth's climate…
Time-dependent meridional circulation and differential rotation in radiative zones are central open issues in stellar evolution theory. We streamline this challenging problem using the downward control principle of atmospheric science,…
We investigate the connections between microscopic chaos, defined on a dynamical level and arising from collisions between molecules, and diffusion, characterized by a mean square displacement proportional to the time. We use a number of…
Mercury is entrapped in a 3:2 resonance: it rotates on its axis three times for every two revolutions it makes around the Sun. It is generally accepted that this is due to the large value of the eccentricity of its orbit. However, the…
Zahn's widely-used model for turbulent mixing induced by rotational shear has recently been validated (with some caveats) in non-rotating shear flows. It is not clear, however, whether his model remains valid in the presence of rotation,…
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 present N-body simulations of resonant planets with inclined orbits that show chaotically evolving eccentricities and inclinations that can persist for at least 10 Gyr. A wide range of behavior is possible, from fast, low amplitude…
Advances in computing power and numerical methodologies over the past several decades sparked a prolific output of dynamical investigations of the late stages of terrestrial planet formation. Among other peculiar inner solar system…
The formation of the solar system's giant planets predated the ultimate epoch of massive impacts that concluded the process of terrestrial planet formation. Following their formation, the giant planets' orbits evolved through an episode of…
We investigate the possibility that the Moon's formation impact was triggered by an early dynamical instability of the giant planets. We consider the well-studied "jumping Jupiter" hypothesis for the solar system's instability, where…
According to Munoz-Gutierrez et al. (2015) the orbit of comet 1P/Halley is chaotic with a surprisingly small Lyapunov time scale of order its orbital period. In this work we analyse the origin of chaos in Halley's orbit and the growth of…
The origin of Mercury still remains poorly understood compared to the other rocky planets of the Solar System. One of the most relevant constraints that any formation model has to fulfill refers to its internal structure, with a predominant…
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…
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…
We investigate numerically the dynamical evolution of simulated meteoroid stream of the Quadrantids ejected from the parent body of the asteroid (196256) 2003 EH1. The main goal of this work is to identify mean motion and secular resonances…
The classical scenario of terrestrial planet formation is characterized by a phase of giant impacts among Moon-to-Mars mass planetary embryos. While the classic model and its adaptations have produced adequate analogs of the outer three…