Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 481, Issue 2, Pages 2205-2212Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty2418
Keywords
methods: numerical; planets and satellites: dynamical evolution and stability
Categories
Funding
- College of Sciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas
- Center For Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) at Northwestern University
- NASA [NNX16AK32G, NNX16AK08G]
- WCAS Undergraduate Research Grant Program
- Quest high performance computing facility at Northwestern University
- NASA [901801, 902845, NNX16AK32G, NNX16AK08G] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
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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.
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