Secular chaos and its application to Mercury, hot Jupiters, and the organization of planetary systems

In the inner solar system, the planets’ orbits evolve chaotically, driven primarily by secular chaos. Mercury has a particularly chaotic orbit, and is in danger of being lost within a few billion years. Just as secular chaos is reorganizing the solar system today, so it has likely helped organize it in the past. We suggest that extrasolar planetary systems are also organized to a large extent by secular chaos. 

A hot Jupiter could be the end state of a secularly chaotic planetary system reminiscent of the solar system. But in the case of the hot Jupiter, the innermost planet was Jupiter- (rather than Mercury-) sized, and its chaotic evolution was terminated when it was tidally captured by its star. In this contribution, we review our recent work elucidating the physics of secular chaos and applying it to Mercury and to hot Jupiters. We also present new results comparing the inclinations of hot Jupiters thus produced with observations.

Yoram Lithwick (Northwestern), Yanqin Wu (Toronto) (Submitted on 5 Nov 2013)

Comments: 6 pages. To appear in PNAS

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)

Cite as: arXiv:1311.1214 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1311.1214v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)

Submission history From: Yoram Lithwick [v1] Tue, 5 Nov 2013 21:00:41 GMT (4402kb,D)