Related papers: Was the Solar System's dynamical instability trigg…
The dynamical structure of the Solar System can be explained by a period of orbital instability experienced by the giant planets. While a late instability was originally proposed to explain the Late Heavy Bombardment, recent work favors an…
The modestly eccentric and non-coplanar orbits of the giant planets pose a challenge to solar system formation theories which generally indicate that the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk in nearly perfectly circular and…
The Solar System's orbital structure is thought to have been sculpted by an episode of dynamical instability among the giant planets. However, the instability trigger and timing have not been clearly established. Hydrodynamical modeling has…
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 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…
The orbits of small bodies in the outer solar system are particularly sensitive to gravitational perturbations, including stellar flybys. Stellar clusters, with low velocity dispersions and high number densities, can be the source of strong…
Most planetary systems -- including our own -- are born within stellar clusters, where interactions with neighboring stars can help shape the system architecture. This paper develops an orbit-averaged formalism to characterize the cluster's…
Most stars form in embedded clusters. Stellar flybys may affect the orbital architecture of the systems by exciting the eccentricity and causing dynamical instability. Since, incidentally, the timescale over which a cluster loses its…
Planetary systems formed in clusters may be subject to stellar encounter flybys. Here we create a diverse range of representative planetary systems with different orbital scales and planets' masses and examine encounters between them in a…
A number of authors have argued that the Sun must have been born in a cluster of no more than about 1000 stars, on the basis that, in a larger cluster, close encounters between the Sun and other stars would have truncated the outer Solar…
The large scale structure of the Solar System has been shaped by a transient dynamical instability that may have been triggered by the interaction of the giants planets with a massive primordial disk of icy debris. In this work, we…
We present a parameter study of the possibility of tidally triggered disk instability. Using a restricted N-body model which allows for a survey of an extended parameter space, we show that a passing dwarf star with a mass between 0.1 and 1…
Stars do not form in isolation but together with other stars, and often in a clustered environment. Depending on the initial conditions in these environments, such as initial density and substructure, the distances of encounters between…
Young stars are mostly found in dense stellar environments, and even our own Solar system may have formed in a star cluster. Here, we numerically explore the evolution of planetary systems similar to our own Solar system in star clusters.…
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…
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…
Most of the observed extrasolar planets are found on tight and often eccentric orbits. The high eccentricities are not easily explained by planet-formation models, which predict that planets should be on rather circular orbits. Here we…
Stars formed in clusters can encounter other stars at close distances. In typical open clusters in the Solar neighbourhood containing hundreds or thousands of member stars, ten to twenty per cent of Solar-mass member stars are expected to…
Modern studies of the early solar system routinely invoke the possibility of an orbital instability among the giant planets triggered by gravitational interactions between the planets and a massive exterior disk of planetesimals. Previous…
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…