One of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century in knowledge of the solar system, other than the discovery of dozens of moons and the planet Pluto, which has since been dismissed as such, is the identification of thousands of orbits of asteroids, the calculation of hundreds of orbits of comets and the estimation of presence in them Edgeworth – Kuiper belt Hundreds of millions of rocks with an average size of 20 kilometers. In the inventory of our immediate environment we have added to large bodies such as the sun and planets the presence of an infinite number of small bodies.
The solar system is filled with objects and all of them are important because in understanding the movement of asteroids, comets and particles that can Impact on Earth is our life. But what has become clear to us in recent years is that the exact structure of the large and small rocks, planets and moons orbiting our star is not as simple as Kepler’s laws suggest. Newton’s laws work, yes, but the exact gravitational effect that determines motion is echoes; changes associated with the cumulative effect of gravitational interactions between planets, Effects of tidal forces and general relativity.
The resonances form a subtle gravitational effect, they build up a subtle effect that works over time and since there’s a lot of that in astrophysics where we’re working on scales of thousands and millions of years, they end up behaving like water on and puncturing landscapes. The dynamic structure of the solar system.
Resonance occurs when there is a simple numerical relationship between frequencies or periods, such as between the period of rotation and the orbit of an object. One of the most obvious cases of this phenomenon is found on the surface of the moon, that is back in fashion, and it has, in addition to the beautiful picture, an orbital period (around the Earth) similar to the period of its rotation (on its axis). As a result, the satellite always shows us the same face. They can also occur between planets when their orbits are coupled, as with the 5:2 relationship between the orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn, which causes their orbital elements to change on time scales of 900 years. The secular resonance occurs in the very long term and is associated with the rotation in space of the orbits of the planets (for those who know what the summit is, it can be visualized in the rotational motion of its axis of rotation).
The point is that the 80s of the last century, in addition to shoulder pads, heaters and questionable hairstyles, brought us computers and the ability to solve equations of dynamics of many bodies over long periods of time, that is, realistically. Chaos came with reality. Come on, now, but not for long, we know that chaos has played a fundamental role in the dynamic evolution of the solar system and there are echoes, either to stabilizing or to destabilizing, playing an essential role.
But, what do we understand from the chaos in dynamics when we study the motion of several bodies at the same time? Although there is no universally accepted definition of chaos, we can understand it in this case, since the simple contrast with determinism and determinism in this context means that the current state of the system allows us to calculate its past and future states if we know all the forces that act. The equations of motion are in the deterministic state like a crystal ball that allows us to know the future. The phenomenon called chaos tells us that unfortunately this is not the case for some dynamical systems, we break the crystal ball and enter the realm of possibilities.
In the study of the solar system and other planetary systems, we have moved from the regular deterministic model of Newton and Laplace to the chaotic model of the latest numerical and analytical studies. An object in the Solar System is said to exhibit chaotic motion if its final dynamic state is reasonably dependent on its initial state. We now know that planets and satellites evolve over a wide range of time scales and have different orbits than they did 4.5 million years ago when the system formed, and that chaos explains many things, for example the unusual rotation of Saturn’s slave moon Hyperion Or the existence of something called hollow Kirkwood in the asteroid belt. There is recent evidence that even the Earth’s orbital motion can be chaotic.
Part of the chaos is stability or lack thereof. The long-term stability of the system is affected by phenomena, some of which are alien to it and others intrinsic. For example, the solar system is moving inside a galaxy, our galaxy, which contains other stars and since friction makes love, this means that, from time to time, one can pass us by. Most accidental encounters do not noticeably change, thank God, the structure of our planetary system. But it’s true that some of the more subtle ones can have a disastrous long-term effect. A recent arithmetic process He found that small perturbations in the orbits of the outer planets can be transmitted and over time affect the potential for destabilization of the inner planets. The future evolution of the Solar System predicts a 1% chance that Mercury’s orbit will destabilize, causing a collision or flight, within the next five billion years.
But this is not the only danger to the stability of our planet. We’ve known for years That one percent of solar system evolution solutions show an increase in Mercury’s orbital eccentricity large enough that it ends up colliding with Venus or the Sun. And what’s even more surprising, in one of these solutions at extreme eccentricity, another decrease in Mercury’s eccentricity results in a transmission of angular momentum from the giant planets that destabilizes all terrestrial planets on a three-billion-year scale with the potential for Mercury, Mars, or Venus to collide with Earth. The future of the Sun also holds uncertainty for us because it is expected to evolve our star and The accompanying mass loss will lead to destabilization long term for the entire solar system.
Founder of the science of nonlinear dynamics, Pierre Simon Laplace, believes in a deterministic world where once the laws of nature are discovered, simply by knowing the initial conditions and solving the appropriate equations, everything about the system will be known. We now know that, at least in terms of solar system dynamics, this is not the case at the moment.
cosmic void It is a section in which our knowledge of the universe is presented in a quantitative and qualitative manner. It aims to explain the importance of understanding the universe not only from a scientific point of view but also from a philosophical, social and economic point of view. The name “cosmic vacuum” refers to the fact that the universe is, for the most part, empty, with less than one atom per cubic meter, despite the fact that in our environment, paradoxically, there are quintillion atoms per cubic meter which invites us to think about our existence and the existence of life in the universe. Section consists Pablo J Perez GonzalezResearcher at the Center for Astrobiology. Patricia Sanchez Blazquez, Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM); s Eve VillavirResearcher at the Center for Astrobiology.
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