Related papers: Is the outer Solar System chaotic?
Exoplanet systems are thought to evolve on secular timescales over billions of years. This evolution is impossible to directly observe on human timescales in most individual systems. While the availability of accurate and precise age…
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…
In the near future there will be launched space missions (e.g. COROT, KEPLER), designed to detect Earth-like extrasolar planets. The orbital elements of these (still hypothetic) planets will contain some uncertainties, that can only be…
The number of extrasolar planets discovered is increasing, so that more than five thousand exoplanets have been confirmed to date. Now we have an opportunity to test the validity of the laws governing planetary systems and take steps to…
Exoplanets, short for `extra solar planets', are planets outside our solar system. They are objects with masses less than around 15 Jupiter-masses that orbit stars other than the Sun. They are small enough so they can not burn deuterium in…
As a result of resonance overlap, planetary systems can exhibit chaotic motion. Planetary chaos has been studied extensively in the Hamiltonian framework, however, the presence of chaotic motion in systems where dissipative effects are…
We have recently hit the milestone of 5,000 exoplanets discovered. In stark contrast with the Solar System, most of the exoplanets we know to date orbit extremely close to their host stars, causing them to lose copious amounts of gas…
The known extrasolar planets exhibit many interesting and surprising features--extremely short-period orbits, high-eccentricity orbits, mean-motion and secular resonances, etc.--and have dramatically expanded our appreciation of the…
Numerical simulations carried out over the past decade suggest that the orbits of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems are unstable, resulting in an apparent chaotic growth of the eccentricity. Here we show that the irregular and…
Studying the orbital stability of multi-planet systems is essential to understand planet formation, estimate the stable time of an observed planetary system, and advance population synthesis models. Although previous studies have primarily…
With the discovery of now more than 500 exoplanets, we present a statistical analysis of the planetary orbital periods and their relationship to the rotation periods of their parent stars. We test whether the structure of planetary orbits,…
The long-term evolution of the outer Solar System is subject to the influence of the giant planets, however, perturbations from other massive bodies located in the region imprint secular signatures, that are discernible in long-term…
Using a purely Newtonian model for the Solar System, we investigate the dynamics of comet 1P/Halley considering in particular the Lyapunov and power spectra of its orbit, using the nominal initial conditions of JPL's Horizons system. We…
This paper compares the statistical features of the sample of discovered extrasolar planets with those of the secondaries in nearby spectroscopic binaries, in order to enable us to distinguish between the two populations. Based on 32 planet…
Giant planet formation process is still not completely understood. The current most accepted paradigm, the core instability model, explains several observed properties of the solar system's giant planets but, to date, has faced difficulties…
In the coming years, it is likely that the first potentially Earth-like planets will be discovered orbiting other stars. Once found, the characterisation of those planets will play a vital role in determining which will be chosen as the…
Dynamical chaos is a fundamental manifestation of gravity in astrophysical, many-body systems. The spectrum of Lyapunov exponents quantifies the associated exponential response to small perturbations. Analytical derivations of these…
We discuss several numerical methods for calculating Lyapunov exponents (a quantitative measure of chaos) in systems of ordinary differential equations. We pay particular attention to constrained systems, and we introduce a variety of…
Our understanding of planetary systems different to our own has grown dramatically in the past 30 years. However, our efforts to ascertain the degree to which the Solar system is abnormal or unique have been hindered by the observational…
Using an innovative damped-Newton method, we report the first calculation of many distinct unstable periodic orbits (UPOs) of a large high-dimensional extensively chaotic partial differential equation. A majority of the UPOs turn out to be…