Gottfried Leibniz

By Scott Tremaine 

Scott Tremaine explores the stability of our solar system, one of the oldest problems in theoretical physics, dating back to Isaac Newton.

The stability of the solar system is one of the oldest problems in theoretical physics, dating back to Isaac Newton. After Newton discovered his famous laws of motion and gravity, he used these to determine the motion of a single planet around the Sun and showed that the planet followed an ellipse with the Sun at one focus. However, the actual solar system contains eight planets, six of which were known to Newton, and each planet exerts small, periodically varying, gravitational forces on all the others.

The puzzle posed by Newton is whether the net effect of these periodic forces on the planetary orbits averages to zero over long times, so that the planets continue to follow orbits similar to the ones they have today, or whether these small mutual interactions gradually degrade the regular arrangement of the orbits in the solar system, leading eventual ly to a collision between two planets, the ejection of a planet to interstellar space, or perhaps the incineration of a planet by the Sun. The interplanetary gravitational interactions are very small—the force on Earth from Jupiter, the largest planet, is only about ten parts per million of the force from the Sun—but the time available for their effects to accumulate is even longer: over four billion years since the solar system was formed, and almost eight billion years until the death of the Sun.