Related papers: Capture and escape in the elliptic restricted thre…
The irregular satellites of outer planets are thought to have been captured from heliocentric orbits. The exact nature of the capture process, however, remains uncertain. We examine the possibility that irregular satellites were captured…
All 4 giant planets in the Solar System host systems of multiple moons, whereas the terrestrial planets only host up to 2 moons. The Earth can capture small asteroids as temporary satellites, which begs the question as to how many moons…
Pairs of migrating extrasolar planets often lock into mean motion resonance as they drift inward. This paper studies the convergent migration of giant planets (driven by a circumstellar disk) and determines the probability that they are…
We consider a restricted four-body problem on the dynamics of a massless particle under the gravitational force produced by three mass points forming an equilateral triangle configuration. We assume that the mass m3 of one primary is very…
The gravitational three-body problem is a fundamental problem in physics and has significant applications to astronomy. Three-body configurations are often considered stable as long the system is hierarchical; that is, the two orbital…
Gas giant planets have been detected on eccentric orbits several hundreds of astronomical units in size around other stars. It has been proposed that even the Sun hosts a wide-orbit planet of 5-10 Earth masses, often called Planet Nine,…
The restricted planar elliptic three body problem (RPETBP) describes the motion of a massless particle (a comet) under the gravitational field of two massive bodies (the primaries, say the Sun and Jupiter) revolving around their center of…
We use the planar circular restricted three-body problem in order to numerically investigate the orbital dynamics of orbits of a spacecraft, or a comet, or an asteroid in the Saturn-Titan system in a scattering region around the Titan. The…
One of the primary surprises of exoplanet detections has been the discovery of compact planetary systems, whereby numerous planets reside within ~0.5 AU of the host star. Many of these kinds of systems have been discovered in recent years,…
The shape of galaxies depends on their orbital populations. These populations change through capture into and escape from resonance. Capture problems fall into distinct cases depending upon the shape of the potential well. To visualise the…
Spherical meteoroids orbiting the Sun experience orbital decay due to the Poynting-Robertson effect and can become trapped in commensurability resonances with a planet. Detail conditions for trapping in the planar circular restricted…
All four giant planets in the Solar system possess irregular satellites, characterized by large, highly eccentric and/or inclined orbits that are distinct from the nearly circular, uninclined orbits of the regular satellites. This…
The elliptic restricted three body problem has been well studied. However, the previous formulations of the problem have used a rotating coordinate system to keep the positions of the primary and secondary on the x-axis. This requires the…
Observational surveys show that at least ~ 30% of short-period multiplanetary systems host tightly packed planets, some of which are locked in stable chains of mean-motion resonances. Despite recent progress, the dynamical stability of…
We investigate the migration of Mars- to super-Earth-sized planets in the vicinity of a pressure bump in a 3D radiative protoplanetary disc while accounting for the effect of accretion heat release. Pressure bumps have often been assumed to…
Using orbital integration and analytical arguments, we have found a new mechanism (an "eccentricity trap") to halt type I migration of planets near the inner edge of a protoplanetary disk. Because asymmetric eccentricity damping due to…
We investigate the stability regions of hypothetical terrestrial planets around the Lagrangian equilibrium points L4 and L5 in some specific extrasolar planetary systems. The problem of their stability can be treated in the framework of the…
The discovery of Jupiter-mass planets in close orbits about their parent stars has challenged models of planet formation. Recent observations have shown that a number of these planets have highly inclined, sometimes retrograde orbits about…
Interstellar objects (ISOs) can become gravitationally bound to the solar system, enabling multiple observations. If these bound ISOs exist, they provide valuable opportunities to generalize models of planetesimal formation, composition,…
This didactic paper is motivated by the problem of understanding how stars escape from globular star clusters. One formulation of this problem is known, in dynamical astronomy, as Hill's problem. Originally intended as a model for the…