Astronomy Colloquium

  Over the last two decades, evidence has mounted that the centuries-old question concerning the dynamical stability of the solar system has a straight-forward, definitive answer: with a probability of ~1%, the inner solar system may gravitationally unravel on a timescale comparable to the remaining main-sequence lifetime of the Sun. Concurrently, as the orbital distribution of extrasolar planets began to surface, it had become clear that dynamical instability is a generic process that plays a central role in shaping the architecture of planetary systems. Despite its inherent significance, an unembellished qualitative description of the onset of orbital disorder is largely missing. In this talk, I will describe a purely analytical theory for the chaotic disintegration of planetary systems. Specifically, with an emphasis on the Solar System, I will delineate a perturbative model that broadly captures the onset of large-scale instability and use it to elucidate the source of Mercury's chaotic behavior, as well as estimate the corresponding Lyapunov and diffusion coefficients. Subsequently, I will present a framework for calculating the characteristic dynamical lifetime of the inner Solar System. The obtained results constitute an important step towards developing an intuitive view of the long-term evolution of planetary systems.