Does a planets orbit ever go chaotic?

[Hamish Cruickshank]

Okay, I am doing grade 12 physics in australia and I was wondering about systems of planets interacting with each others gravity and whether this could cause chaos with orbits.

If all the other planets in out solar system effect one another, does there ever end up a point where the clockwork orbits will go chaotic? I don't know a lot about chaos, but there must become a point with Newtons gravitational laws and Keplars laws where it all goes pear-shaped and one of the planets orbits gets all messed up.

Could you predict when this would happen?

Youll have to excuse my punctuation as I am using a mac and the damn apostrophe won't work... grrr

 

[mgb_phys]

The planets orbits are chaotic (for some definitions of chaos)
Long term stability is probably due to resonanance where planets ahe settled into orbits where they each nudge each other into stability.
This article describes it rather better than I have!

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12416923.900.html

 

[J77]

If you want to see the dynamic complexity of just a (restricted) 3-body problem look here: http://cmvl.cs.concordia.ca/publications/r3b-06.ps.gz (at least I think that's the one with nice pics...)

Can the orbits go chaotic tho?

First thought would be that it would require an unphysically huge perturbation -- at least in the short time.

 

[merryjman]

http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/Flash/Chaos/ThreeBody/ThreeBody.html

This is an interesting applet that will let you further explore the chaotic 3-body system. Of course, the objects are treated as point masses, and the suns aren't allowed to move, so it's not necessarily physically accurate.

 

[J77]

That applet's very nice

 

[Hamish Cruickshank]

Cool thanks I'll check it out