17 research outputs found
Dynamical Evolution of Planetary Systems
Planetary systems can evolve dynamically even after the full growth of the
planets themselves. There is actually circumstantial evidence that most
planetary systems become unstable after the disappearance of gas from the
protoplanetary disk. These instabilities can be due to the original system
being too crowded and too closely packed or to external perturbations such as
tides, planetesimal scattering, or torques from distant stellar companions. The
Solar System was not exceptional in this sense. In its inner part, a crowded
system of planetary embryos became unstable, leading to a series of mutual
impacts that built the terrestrial planets on a timescale of ~100 My. In its
outer part, the giant planets became temporarily unstable and their orbital
configuration expanded under the effect of mutual encounters. A planet might
have been ejected in this phase. Thus, the orbital distributions of planetary
systems that we observe today, both solar and extrasolar ones, can be different
from the those emerging from the formation process and it is important to
consider possible long-term evolutionary effects to connect the two.Comment: Review to appear as a chapter in the "Handbook of Exoplanets", ed. H.
Deeg & J.A. Belmont