Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-4-2018

Publication Title

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Volume

481

Issue

2

First page number:

2205

Last page number:

2212

Abstract

Planetary systems with more than two bodies will experience orbital crossings at a time related to the initial orbital separations of the planets. After a crossing, the system enters a period of chaotic evolution ending in the reshaping of the system’s architecture via planetary collisions or ejections. We carry out N-body integrations on a large number of systems with equally spaced planets (in units of the Hill radius) to determine the distribution of instability times for a given planet separation. We investigate both the time to the initiation of instability through a close encounter and the time to a planet--planet collision. We find that a significant portion of systems with non-zero mutual inclinations survive after a close encounter and do not promptly experience a planet--planet collision. Systems with significant inclinations can continue to evolve for over 1000 times longer than the encounter time. The fraction of long-lived systems is dependent on the absolute system scale and the initial inclination of the planets. These results have implications to the assumed stability of observed planetary systems.

Keywords

Methods: Numerical; Planets and Satellites: Dynamical Evolution and Stability

Disciplines

Astrophysics and Astronomy

File Format

PDF

File Size

2.136 Kb

Language

English

Permissions

This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society©: 2018 [owner as specified on the article] Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

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