Related papers: Is the outer Solar System chaotic?
It is thought that, sometime after their formation, the solar system's giant planets experienced a dynamical instability that caused their orbits to excite, diverge, and ejected one or more objects with masses comparable to the ice giants.…
Many of the known extrasolar planets are ``hot Jupiters,'' giant planets with orbital periods of just a few days. We use the observed distribution of hot Jupiters to constrain the location of its inner edge in the mass--period diagram. If…
Over the past three decades, we have witnessed one of the great revolutions in our understanding of the cosmos - the dawn of the Exoplanet Era. Where once we knew of just one planetary system (the Solar system), we now know of thousands,…
The bright F8 V solar-type star upsilon Andromedae has recently been reported to have a system of three planets of Jovian masses. In order to investigate the orbital stability and mutual gravitational interactions among these extrasolar…
The Solar System hosts the most studied and best understood major and minor planetary bodies - and the only extraterrestrial bodies to have been visited by spacecraft. The Solar System therefore provides important constraints on both the…
This article relates two topics of central importance in modern astronomy - the discovery some fifteen years ago of the first planets around other stars (exoplanets), and the centuries-old problem of understanding the origin of our own…
The ejection of planets by the instability of planetary systems is a potential source of free-floating planets. We numerically simulate multi-planet systems to study the evolution process, the properties of surviving systems, and the…
A new era of directly imaged extrasolar planets has produced a three-planet system (Marois et al. 2008), where the masses of the planets have been estimated by untested cooling models. We point out that the nominal circular, face-on orbits…
A large sample of planet-planet scattering events for three planet systems with different orbital separations and masses is analyzed with a multiple regression model. The dependence of the time for the onset of instability on the masses of…
An essential component of planetary climatology is knowledge of the tropospheric temperature field and its variability. Previous studies of Jupiter hinted at periodic behavior that was non-seasonal, as well as dynamical relationships…
Among the hundred of known extrasolar planets, about 15% are closer than 0.1 AU from their parent stars. But there are extremely few detections of planets orbiting in less than 3 days. At this limit the planet HD209458b has been found to…
Many exoplanets have been observed close to their parent stars with orbital periods of a few days. As for the major satellites of the Jovian planets, the figure of these planets is expected to be strongly shaped by tidal forces. However,…
Among the hundred or so extrasolar planets discovered to date, 19 are orbiting a component of a double or multiple star system. In this paper, we discuss the properties of these planets and compare them to the characteristics of planets…
In this paper we investigate the effects that an anomalous acceleration as that experienced by the Pioneer spacecraft after they passed the 20 AU threshold would induce on the orbital motions of the Solar System planets placed at…
The dynamical status of isolated quantum systems, partly due to the linearity of the Schrodinger equation is unclear: Conventional measures fail to detect chaos in such systems. However, when quantum systems are subjected to observation --…
Nowadays, many extrasolar planetary systems possessing at least one planet on a highly eccentric orbit have been discovered. In this work, we study the possible long-term stability of such systems. We consider the general three body problem…
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…
Precision radial velocity (RV) measurements of the Sun-like dwarf 14 Herculis published by Naef et. al (2004), Butler et. al (2006) and Wittenmyer et al (2007) reveal a Jovian planet in a 1760 day orbit and a trend indicating the second…
Most observed extrasolar planets have masses similar to, but orbits very different from, the gas giants of our solar system. Many are much closer to their parent stars than would have been expected and their orbits are often rather…
A collection is made of presently unexplained phenomena within our Solar system and in the universe. These phenomena are (i) the Pioneer anomaly, (ii) the flyby anomaly, (iii) the increase of the Astronomical Unit, (iv) the quadrupole and…