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Session 69 - Instabilities in Planetary Systems.
Display session, Friday, January 09
Exhibit Hall,
When Saturn's orbital elements are slightly changed from their present values, the motion of the Jovian planets enters a large, robustly chaotic zone associated with the 2:5 mean-motion near-resonance between Jupiter and Saturn. The transition to chaos is through large increases in the secular frequency associated with Saturn's perihelion while the other secular frequencies do not change. The chaotic zone is closer in the orbital elements' phase space to their current values than the range taken on by these values. It is plausible, therefore, to suspect that passages through such chaotic zones did occur throughout the history of the Solar System.
