May Issue of S & T - Part 3 of 3

[Bernd Pauli HD <bernd.pauli@lehrer1.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>]

Sky & Telescope - May 1999, p. 24:

Our Stabilizing Earth

Ever on the prowl for interesting " what if " scenarios, planetary
dynamicists have recently come to appreciate the role Earth plays in
stabilizing the inner solar system. This new insight came to light
almost by accident when Kimmo Innanen (York University, Canada) and
Seppo Mikkola (University of Turku, Finland) were testing computer
routines that perform long-term simulations of planetary motions. They
found that removing the Earth-Moon system from their calculations caused
the orbits of Venus and especially Mercury to gyrate wildly in
eccentricity, with the likely outcome being Mercury's ejection by Venus
from the inner-planet region or an outright collision between the two.
As Innanen, Mikkoia, and colleague Paul Wiegert (York University)
describe in last October's Astronomical Journal, the instability would
result from a previously unrecognized resonance involving Venus and
Jupiter. But having a sizable object at Earth's heliocentric distance,
even one with only 10 percent of our planet's mass, is enough to damp
out the resonance.


Best wishes,

Bernd


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