General relativistic precession and the long-term stability of the solar system
arXiv:2303.05567 · doi:10.1093/mnras/stad719
Abstract
The long-term evolution of the solar system is chaotic. In some cases, chaotic diffusion caused by an overlap of secular resonances can increase the eccentricity of planets when they enter into a linear secular resonance, driving the system to instability. Previous work has shown that including general relativistic contributions to the planets' precession frequency is crucial when modelling the solar system. It reduces the probability that the solar system destabilizes within 5 Gyr by a factor of 60. We run 1280 additional N-body simulations of the solar system spanning 12.5 Gyr where we allow the GR precession rate to vary with time. We develop a simple, unified, Fokker-Planck advection-diffusion model that can reproduce the instability time of Mercury with, without, and with time-varying GR precession. We show that while ignoring GR precession does move Mercury's precession frequency closer to a resonance with Jupiter, this alone does not explain the increased instability rate. It is necessary that there is also a significant increase in the rate of diffusion. We find that the system responds smoothly to a change in the precession frequency: There is no critical GR precession frequency below which the solar system becomes significantly more unstable. Our results show that the long-term evolution of the solar system is well described with an advection-diffusion model.
arXiv comment8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS
References in corpus (22)
- REBOUND: An open-source multi-purpose N-body code for collisional dynamics
- Emergent Gravity and the Dark Universe
- WHFast: A fast and unbiased implementation of a symplectic Wisdom-Holman integrator for long term gravitational simulations
- REBOUNDx: A Library for Adding Conservative and Dissipative Forces to Otherwise Symplectic N-body Integrations
- Deploying a Top-100 Supercomputer for Large Parallel Workloads: the Niagara Supercomputer
- Long-term planetary integration with individual time steps
- Excitation and Propagation of Eccentricity Disturbances in Planetary Systems
- Testing modified gravity with globular cluster velocity dispersions
- Theory of Secular Chaos and Mercury's Orbit
- On the Dynamical Stability of the Solar System
- On the evolution of mean motion resonances through stochastic forcing: Fast and slow libration modes and the origin of HD128311
- Chaotic Disintegration of the Inner Solar System
- High order symplectic integrators for planetary dynamics and their implementation in REBOUND
- Dynamic stability of the Solar System: Statistically inconclusive results from ensemble integrations
- Long-term dynamics of the solar system inner planets
- Fundamental limits from chaos on instability time predictions in compact planetary systems
- On the long-term stability of the Solar System in the presence of weak perturbations from stellar flybys
- Rare Event Sampling Improves Mercury Instability Statistics
- On the accuracy of symplectic integrators for secularly evolving planetary systems
- The solar system test for the general modified gravity theories
- Long-term instability of the inner Solar System: numerical experiments
- Simple physics and integrators accurately reproduce Mercury instability statistics