Related papers: Chaos in the Solar System

Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar System's Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is…

The small bodies in the Kuiper Belt region of the distant Solar System are leftovers from planet formation. Their orbital distribution today tells us about how giant planets migrated, while their surface properties, shapes, and sizes tell…

Planetary systems can evolve dynamically even after the planets themselves have fully formed, and there is circumstantial evidence that most planetary systems become unstable after the disappearance of the gaseous protoplanetary disk.…

The five planets discovered around the main-sequence star 55 Cnc may represent a case of stable chaos. By using both the Frequency Map Analysis and MEGNO we find that about 15 % of the systems that can be build from the nominal orbital…

Chaotic diffusion is supposed to be responsible for orbital instabilities in planetary systems after the dissipation of the protoplanetary disk, and a natural consequence of irregular motion. In this paper we show that resonant…

The long-term dynamical evolution of a Keplerian binary orbit due to the emission and absorption of gravitational radiation is investigated. This work extends our previous results on transient chaos in the planar case to the three…

The navigation satellite constellations in medium-Earth orbit exist in a background of third-body secular resonances stemming from the perturbing gravitational effects of the Moon and the Sun. The resulting chaotic motions, emanating from…

Rings are ubiquitous around giant planets in our Solar System. They evolve jointly with the nearby satellite system. They could form either during the giant planet formation process or much later, as a result of large scale dynamical…

To improve our understanding of orbital instabilities in compact planetary systems, we compare suites of $N$-body simulations against numerical integrations of simplified dynamical models. We show that, surprisingly, dynamical models that…

Planets which are smaller than Mercury and heated to sublimation temperatures of $\sim$2000 K lose mass catastrophically in dusty evaporative winds. The winds are observed to gust and recede largely without pattern; transit depths from the…

We present a stability analysis of a large set of simulated planetary systems of three or more planets based on architectures of multiplanet systems discovered by \textit{Kepler} and \textit{K2}. We propagated 21,400 simulated planetary…

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 majority of stars form in star clusters and many are thought to have planetary companions. We demonstrate that multi-planet systems are prone to instabilities as a result of frequent stellar encounters in these star clusters much more…

Chaos is a phenomenon that occurs in many aspects of contemporary science. In classical dynamics, chaos is defined as a hypersensitivity to initial conditions. The presence of chaos is often unwanted, as it introduces unpredictability,…

We consider the chaotic motion of low-mass bodies in two-body high-order mean-motion resonances with planets in model planetary systems, and analytically estimate the Lyapunov and diffusion timescales of the motion in multiplets of…

Disks of bodies orbiting a much more massive central object are extremely common in astrophysics. When the orbits comprising such disks are eccentric, we show they are susceptible to a new dynamical instability. Gravitational forces between…

The potential existence of a distant planet ("Planet Nine") in the Solar system has prompted a re-think about the evolution of planetary systems. As the Sun transitions from a main sequence star into a white dwarf, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus…

Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between several giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities would…

Chaotic dynamics can be quite heterogeneous in the sense that in some regions the dynamics are unstable in more directions than in other regions. When trajectories wander between these regions, the dynamics is complicated. We say a chaotic…

Surveys have revealed many multi-planet systems containing super-Earths and Neptunes in orbits of a few days to a few months. There is debate whether in situ assembly or inward migration is the dominant mechanism of the formation of such…