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Session 94 - New Dynamics and Views of the Solar System.
Oral session, Wednesday, January 15
Frontenac Ballroom,
The modern era of fast digital computers and the exploration and mapping of the Solar System have produced a renaissance in celestial mechanics. Spectular progress has been made in the numerical methods that are necessary for the efficient simulation of n-body systems, as well as in algebraic manipulators. A good starting point is the work on the Giant Planets as a system, and its interplay with with short and long-period comets, the Oort Cloud, the local Galactic environment, and, the Kuiper Belt. The presence of many resonances in the Solar System has long been suspected to have great significance for its long-term behavior. This has now been amply confirmed through the presence of chaos in planetary and asteroid orbits, and there is widespraed interest in collisions between planet-crossing trajectories and the planets themselves. Solar System simulations have also predicted that many of the planets may be able to host Trojan type objects. So far, the Mars Trojan 1990MB = Eureka is the only known object in this class. A new type of stable Solar System orbit has also recently been identified, and its stability analysis has been expedited with an algebraic manipulator, working together with classical perturbation theory. The presentation will conclude with other results in the terrestrial region, on the importance of the discovery of nearby planetary systems, and the outlook for the future.
