Related papers: A Planetary System with an Escaping Mars
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…
The dynamical evolution of nearly half of the known extrasolar planets in multiple-planet systems may be dominated by secular perturbations. The commonly high eccentricities of the planetary orbits calls into question the utility of the…
Earth, Mars, and Venus, irradiated by an evolving Sun, have had fascinating but diverging histories of habitability. Although only Earth's surface is considered to be habitable today, all three planets might have simultaneously been…
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…
We study in detail the motions of three planets interacting with each other under the influence of a central star. It is known that the system with more than two planets becomes unstable after remaining quasi-stable for long times, leading…
Although current sensitivity limits are such that true Solar System analogs remain challenging to detect, numerous planetary systems have been discovered that are very different from our own Solar System. The majority of systems harbor a…
Recent exoplanet observations reported a large number of multiple-planet systems, in which some of the planets are in a chain of resonances. The fraction of resonant systems to non-resonant systems provides clues about their formation…
A gap in exoplanets' radius distribution has been widely attributed to the photo-evaporation threshold of their progenitors' gaseous envelope. Giant impacts can also lead to substantial mass-loss. The outflowing gas endures tidal torque…
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…
The observed wide eccentricity distribution of extrasolar giant planets is thought to be the result of dynamical instabilities and gravitational scattering among planets. Previously, it has been assumed that the orbits in giant planet…
Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era, particularly given the discovery of a large and diverse terrestrial exoplanet population. Discerning the primary factors that contribute to…
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.…
Apart from being chaotic, the inner planets in the Solar System constitute an open system, as they are forced by the regular long-term motion of the outer ones. No integrals of motion can bound a priori the stochastic wanderings in their…
Many dynamical aspects of the solar system can be explained by the outer planets experiencing a period of orbital instability sometimes called the Nice Model. Though often correlated with a perceived delayed spike in the lunar cratering…
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…
The existence of chaos in the system of Jovian planets has been in question for the past 15 years. Various investigators have found Lyapunov times ranging from about 5 millions years upwards to infinity, with no clear reason for the…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing of the giant planets, can be explained if planets radially migrated by exchanging orbital energy and momentum with outer disk planetesimals. Neptune's…
Despite the discovery of thousands of exoplanets in recent years, the number of known exoplanets in star clusters remains tiny. This may be a consequence of close stellar encounters perturbing the dynamical evolution of planetary systems in…
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 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…