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Science 19 March 1999:
Vol. 283. no. 5409, pp. 1877 - 1881
DOI: 10.1126/science.283.5409.1877
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Research Articles

The Origin of Chaos in the Outer Solar System

N. Murray, 1 M. Holman 2

Classical analytic theories of the solar system indicate that it is stable, but numerical integrations suggest that it is chaotic. This disagreement is resolved by a new analytic theory. The theory shows that the chaos among the jovian planets results from the overlap of the components of a mean motion resonance among Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and provides rough estimates of the Lyapunov time (107 years) and the dynamical lifetime of Uranus (1018 years). The jovian planets must have entered the resonance after all the gas and most of the planetesimals in the protoplanetary disk were removed.

1 Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto, 60 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H8, Canada.
2 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

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