M. Juric, S. Tremaine (Princeton University)
There are over a 100 currently known extrasolar planetary systems, exhibiting planets with a diversity of masses, orbital eccentricities, inclinations and semimajor axes. Their properties, as observed today, are a combination of events which took place during the formation stage (including interaction with the disk - migrations), and the long-term (~Gyr timescale) dynamical evolution stage which followed after the disk has been cleared out. It is not obvious which of the two stages, and under which conditions, dominates in shaping the system's stability and dynamical properties in the long run.
In this work, we investigate the influence of the second stage. We follow the long-term evolution and stability of N~104 planetary systems with n = 10 planets on 100Myr to a few Gyr timescales. As there is no reliable global stability criterion for few-body problems, to find and study stable systems we turn to numerical integrations using the hybrid symplectic algorithm described in Chambers (1999). We look for classes of stable initial configurations, their properties, and their similarity to the final systems' properties. We also attempt to quantify the dependence of the probability of survival of a multi-planet system on the initial conditions of the system, and the "survivability" of multi-planet systems.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: mjuric@astro.princeton.edu
Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #2
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.