Dynamical Evidence For An Early Giant Planet Instability (Icarus, 2020)
VPL Authors
Full Citation:
Ribeiro, R. de S., Morbidelli, A., Raymond, S. N., Izidoro, A., Gomes, R., & Vieira Neto, E. (2020). Dynamical Evidence For An Early Giant Planet Instability. Icarus, 339, 113605. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2019.113605.
Abstract:
The dynamical structure of the Solar System can be explained by a period of orbital instability experienced by the giant planets. While a late instability was originally proposed to explain the Late Heavy Bombardment, recent work favors an early instability. Here we model the early dynamical evolution of the outer Solar System to self-consistently constrain the most likely timing of the instability. We first simulate the dynamical sculpting of the primordial outer planetesimal disk during the accretion of Uranus and Neptune from migrating planetary embryos during the gas disk phase, and determine the separation between Neptune and the inner edge of the planetesimal disk. We performed simulations with a range of (inward and outward) migration histories for Jupiter. We find that, unless Jupiter migrated inwards by 10 AU or more, the instability almost certainly happened within 100 Myr of the start of Solar System formation. There are two distinct possible instability triggers. The first is an instability that is triggered by the planets themselves, with no appreciable influence from the planetesimal disk. About half of the planetary systems that we consider have a self-triggered instability. Of those, the median instability time is
URL:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103519301332?via%3Dihub
VPL Research Tasks:
Task A: Solar System Analogs for Exoplanets