Princeton University Thunch Talk

The vast majority of known exoplanet systems are billions of years old. Over these long lifetimes, chaotic gravitational interactions among the planets can lead to violent collisions and restructurings of their orbits. Indeed, the observed sample shows strong evidence of having been sculpted by such cataclysms, but the dynamical pathways to such instabilities, and the prediction of their associated timescales, are long-standing theoretical problems. I will describe our recent work elucidating the underlying dynamics that drive chaos in closely packed systems, and how we are using this new ability to predict the long-term stability of planetary systems to better understand the planet formation process.