Related papers: Is the outer Solar System chaotic?
As a direct result of ongoing efforts to detect more exoplanetary systems, an ever-increasing number of multiple-planet systems are being announced. But how many of these systems are truly what they seem? In many cases, such systems are…
Observations indicate that intermediate mass stars, binary stars, and stellar remnants often host planets; a complete explanation of these systems requires an understanding of how planetary orbits evolve as their central stars lose mass.…
We estimate the Lyapunov times (characteristic times of predictability of motion) in Quillen's models for the dynamics in the solar neighborhood. These models take into account perturbations due to the Galactic bar and spiral arms. For…
Just fourteen years ago the Solar System represented the only known planetary system in the Galaxy, and conceptions of planet formation were shaped by this sample of one. Since then, 320 planets have been discovered orbiting 276 individual…
Exoplanet surveys have confirmed one of humanity's (and all teenagers') worst fears: we are weird. If our Solar System were observed with present-day Earth technology -- to put our system and exoplanets on the same footing -- Jupiter is the…
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…
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…
Motivated by recent measurements of the free-floating planet mass function at terrestrial masses, we consider the possibility that the solar system may have captured a terrestrial planet early in its history. We show that $\sim 1.2$…
We carried out an extensive analysis of the stability of the outer solar system, making use of the frequency analysis technique over short-term integrations of nearly a hundred thousand test particles, as well as a statistical analysis of…
Since the discovery of the first extra-solar planets, we are confronted with the puzzling diversity of planetary systems. Processes like planet radial migration in gas-disks and planetary orbital instabilities, often invoked to explain the…
The apparent regularity of the motion of the giant planets of our solar system suggested for decades that said planets formed onto orbits similar to the current ones and that nothing dramatic ever happened during their lifetime. The…
The formation of the solar system's terrestrial planets has been numerically modeled in various works, and many other studies have been devoted to characterizing our modern planets' chaotic dynamical state. However, it is still not known…
Black holes binaries support unstable orbits at very close separations. In the simplest case of geodesics around a Schwarzschild black hole the orbits, though unstable, are regular. Under perturbation the unstable orbits can become the…
Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…
Ground-based searches for transiting Jupiter-sized planets have so far produced few detections of planets, but many of stellar systems with eclipse depths, durations, and orbital periods that resemble those expected from planets. I show…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing and orbital eccentricities of giant planets, can be explained if the early Solar System evolved through a dynamical instability followed by migration of planets in…
The statistics of extrasolar planetary systems indicate that the default mode of planet formation generates planets with orbital periods shorter than 100 days, and masses substantially exceeding that of the Earth. When viewed in this…
For the past decade there has been a considerable debate about the existence of chaos in the mixmaster cosmological model. The debate has been hampered by the coordinate, or observer dependence of standard chaotic indicators such as…
A wealth of Earth-sized exoplanets will be discovered in the coming years, proving a large pool of candidates from which the targets for the search for life beyond the Solar system will be chosen. The target selection process will require…
The organization of the orbits of most minor bodies in the Solar system seems to follow random patterns, the result of billions of years of chaotic dynamical evolution. Much as heterogeneous orbital behaviour is ubiquitous, dynamically…