A new analysis of chaos in the solar system reveals how planetary collisions are avoided over billions of years.
That's because the orbits of the inner solar system planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — are chaotic, and models have suggested that these inner planets should have crashed into each other by now. And yet, that hasn't happened.Through a deep plunge into the models for planetary motion, the researchers discovered that the motions of the inner planets are constrained by certain parameters that act as a tether that inhibits the system's chaos.
The time it takes for two trajectories with almost identical starting conditions to diverge by a specific amount is known as the Lyapunov time of the chaotic system. In 1989, Jacques Laskar , astronomer and research director at the National Center for Scientific Research and Paris Observatory and a co-author of the new study, calculated the characteristic Lyapunov time for the planetary orbits of the inner solar system was just 5 million years.
Laskar then looked at the problem in a different way: by simulating the inner planet trajectories over the next 5 billion years, stepping from one moment to the next. He found just a 1% chance of a planetary collision. With the same approach, he calculated that it would take, on average, about 30 billion years for any of the planets to collide.
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