The Changing Perception of the Solar System

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in understanding the dynamic history of the solar system, emphasizing planetary migration and instabilities that shaped current planetary orbits, supported by computer simulations.

Contribution

It presents a unified simulation model that integrates recent theories on solar system evolution, advancing the understanding of planetary orbital changes over billions of years.

Findings

Planetary migration significantly influenced orbital configurations.

Dynamical instabilities contributed to orbital eccentricities and inclinations.

The simulation unifies multiple theories into a comprehensive evolutionary model.

Abstract

The solar system has changed dramatically since its birth, and so did our understanding of it. A considerable research effort has been invested in the past decade in an attempt to reconstruct the solar system history, including the earliest stages some 4.5 billion years ago. The results indicate how several processes, such as planetary migration and dynamical instabilities, acted to relax the orbital spacing of the outer planets, and provided the needed perturbation to explain the present planetary orbits that are not precisely circular and coplanar. Here we highlight this work and illustrate the key results in a computer simulation that unifies several recently developed theories. The emerging view represents another step away from the initial perception of the solar system as part of unchanging heavens.