http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.14844
The long-term stability of the Solar System is an issue of significant scientific and philosophical interest. The mechanism most likely to lead to instability is Mercury’s eccentricity being pumped up to a high enough value that Mercury is either scattered by or collides with Venus. Previously, only three five-billion-year $N$-body ensembles of the Solar System with thousands of simulations have been run to assess long-term stability. We generate two additional ensembles, each with 2750 members, and make them publicly available at https://archive.org/details/@dorianabbot. We find that accurate Mercury instability statistics can be obtained by (1) including only the Sun and the 8 planets, (2) using a simple Wisdom-Holman scheme without correctors, (3) using a basic representation of general relativity, and (4) using a time step of 3.16 days. By combining our Solar System ensembles with previous ensembles we form a 9,601-member ensemble of ensembles. In this ensemble of ensembles, the logarithm of the frequency of a Mercury instability event increases linearly with time between 1.3 and 5 Gyr, suggesting that a single mechanism is responsible for Mercury instabilities in this time range and that this mechanism becomes more active as time progresses. Our work provides a robust estimate of Mercury instability statistics over the next five billion years, outlines methodologies that may be useful for exoplanet system investigations, and provides two large ensembles of publicly available Solar System integrations that can serve as testbeds for theoretical ideas as well as training sets for artificial intelligence schemes.
D. Abbot, D. Hernandez, S. Hadden, et. al.
Mon, 2 Jan 23
26/44
Comments: submitted to ApJ