Related papers: Asteroids in the Inner Solar System I - Existence
This paper presents synthetic observations of long-lived, coorbiting asteroids of Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Mars. Our sample is constructed by taking the limiting semimajor axes, differential longitudes and inclinations for long-lived…
The only discovery of Earth Trojan 2010 TK$_7$ and the subsequent launch of OSIRIS-REx motive us to investigate the stability around the triangular Lagrange points $L_4$ and $L_5$ of the Earth. In this paper we present detailed dynamical…
We perform long-term simulations, up to ten billion years, of closely-spaced configurations of 2 -- 6 planets, each as massive as the Earth, traveling on nested orbits about either stellar component in $\alpha$ Centauri AB. The innermost…
We present an analytical proof assisted by computer calculations for the dynamical stability of the eight main planets and Pluto for the next 100,000 years. It means that the semi-major axes of the planets will not change significantly…
We have studied planetary systems which are similar to the Solar System and built up from three inner rocky planets (Venus, Earth, Mars) and two outer gas giants. The stability of the orbits of the inner planets is discussed in the cases of…
Due to their strong resonances with their host planet, Trojan asteroids can remain in stable orbits for billions of years. As a result, they are powerful probes for constraining the dynamical and chemical history of the solar system.…
The recent years have witnessed a carnival of discoveries in the Outer Solar System. Here we provide evidence from numerical simulations of orbital stability to suggest the possible existence of two long lived belts of primordial…
Debates regarding the age and inclination of the planetary system orbiting HR 8799, and the release of additional astrometric data following the discovery of the fourth planet prompted us to examine the possibility of constraining these two…
Recent work has suggested that many planetary systems lie near instability. If all systems are near instability, an additional planet must exist in stable regions of well-separated extra-solar planetary systems to push these systems to the…
The Kepler mission results indicate that systems of tightly-packed inner planets (STIPs) are present around of order 5% of FGK field stars (whose median age is ~5 Gyr). We propose that STIPs initially surrounded nearly all such stars and…
The area of stable motion for fictitious Trojan asteroids around Uranus' equilateral equilibrium points is investigated with respect to the inclination of the asteroid's orbit to determine the size of the regions and their shape. For this…
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…
Recently the first Earth Trojan has been observed (Mainzer et al., ApJ 731) and found to be on an interesting orbit close to the Lagrange point L4 (Connors et al., Nature 475). In the present study we therefore perform a detailed…
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…
Unlike Trojans, horseshoe coorbitals are not generally considered to be long-term stable (Dermott and Murray, 1981; Murray and Dermott, 1999). As the lifetime of Earth's and Venus's horseshoe coorbitals is expected to be about a Gyr, we…
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…
To date, no accretion model has succeeded in reproducing all observed constraints in the inner Solar System. These constraints include 1) the orbits, in particular the small eccentricities, and 2) the masses of the terrestrial planets --…
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…
We conduct a systematic survey of the regions in which distant satellites can orbit stably around the four giant planets in the solar system, using orbital integrations of up to $10^9$ yr. In contrast to previous investigations, we use a…
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…