Mercury's chaotic secular evolution as a subdiffusive process

TL;DR

This paper introduces a subdiffusive model to better predict Mercury's orbital instability, capturing short-term variations more accurately than traditional diffusion models, and explores fundamental questions in Solar System dynamics.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel subdiffusive phenomenological model for Mercury's orbital parameter g1, improving short-term instability predictions over previous diffusive models.

Findings

Subdiffusive model matches Mercury instability statistics from 1-40 Gyr.

Standard diffusion underpredicts short-term instability probability by up to 10,000 times.

Larger short-term variations in g1 are better captured by subdiffusion.

Abstract

Mercury's orbit can destabilize, generally resulting in a collision with either Venus or the Sun. Chaotic evolution can cause g1 to decrease to the approximately constant value of g5 and create a resonance. Previous work has approximated the variation in g1 as stochastic diffusion, which leads to a phenomological model that can reproduce the Mercury instability statistics of secular and N-body models on timescales longer than 10 Gyr. Here we show that the diffusive model underpredicts the Mercury instability probability by a factor of 3-10,000 on timescales less than 5 Gyr, the remaining lifespan of the Solar System. This is because g1 exhibits larger variations on short timescales than the diffusive model would suggest. To better model the variations on short timescales, we build a new subdiffusive phenomological model for g1. Subdiffusion is similar to diffusion but exhibits larger displacements on short timescales and smaller displacements on long timescales. We choose model parameters based on the behavior of the g1 trajectories in the N-body simulations, leading to a tuned model that can reproduce Mercury instability statistics from 1-40 Gyr. This work motivates fundamental questions in Solar System dynamics: Why does subdiffusion better approximate the variation in g1 than standard diffusion? Why is there an upper bound on g1, but not a lower bound that would prevent it from reaching g5?