Dynamical Instabilities in Extrasolar Planetary Systems Containing Two Giant Planets

Eric B. Ford*, Marketa Havlickova, Frederic A. Rasio

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

133 Scopus citations

Abstract

Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between several giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities seem to provide a natural mechanism for producing the highly eccentric orbits seen in many systems. Here we present results from a new set of numerical integrations for the dynamical evolution of planetary systems containing two identical giant planets in nearly circular orbits very close to the dynamical stability limit. We determine the statistical properties of the three main types of systems resulting from the development of an instability: systems containing one planet, following either a collision between the two initial planets, or the ejection of one of them to infinity, and systems containing two planets in a new, quasi-stable configuration. We discuss the implications of our results for the formation and evolution of observed extrasolar planetary systems. We conclude that the distributions of eccentricities and semimajor axes for observed systems cannot be explained easily by invoking dynamical interactions between two planets initially on circular orbits. While highly eccentric orbits can be produced naturally by these interactions, collisions between the two planets, which occur frequently in the range of observed semimajor axes, would result in many more nearly circular orbits than in the observed sample.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)303-313
Number of pages11
JournalIcarus
Volume150
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2001

Funding

We are grateful to Scott Tremaine for valuable conversations. We also thank the referees, S. Ida and P. Wiegert, for many useful comments on the original manuscript. This work was supported in part by NSF Grant AST-9618116 and NASA ATP Grant NAG5-8460. F.A.R. was supported in part by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Our computations were supported by the National Computational Science Alliance under Grant AST980014N and utilized the SGI/Cray Origin2000 supercomputers at Boston University and NCSA, and the Condor system at the University of Wisconsin.

Keywords

  • Planetary systems
  • Planets and satellites
  • Solar System
  • Stars

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Space and Planetary Science

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