On the Stability of the Terrestrial Planets as Models for Exosolar Planetary Systems

All results, achieved up to now, show the long term stability of our planetary system, although, especially the inner solar system is chaotic, due to some specific secular resonances. We study, by means of numerical integrations, the dynamical evolution of the planetary system where we concentrate on the stability of motion of the terrestrial planets Venus, Earth and Mars. Our model consists of a simplified planetary system with the inner planets Venus, Earth and Mars as well as Jupiter and Saturn. A mass factor was introduced to uniformly change the masses of the terrestrial planets; Jupiter and Saturn were involved in the system with their actual masses. We integrated the equations of motion with a Lie-integration method for a time interval of 10⁷ years. It turned out that when 220 < < 245 and > 250 the system became unstable due to the strong interactions between the planets. We discuss the model planetary systems for small mass-factors 0.5 10 and large ones 160 270 with the aid of several different numerical tools. These results can be applied to recently discovered exoplanetary systems, which configuration is comparable to our own.