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Planetary science

When giants roamed

Nature volume 435, pages 432–433 (2005)Cite this article

An early epoch of planetary migration could explain the current orbits of the giant planets, the origin of Jupiter's Trojans, and an intense bombardment of the early Solar System with a shower of asteroids and comets.

In a triplet of papers in this issue1,2,3, H. F. Levison and colleagues contend that the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have been disturbed in a small but significant way. They argue that the giant planets' eccentricities (the deviation of their orbits from a true circle) and inclinations (the tilt of their orbital planes) are much larger than those predicted by theories of planet formation — which implies that some process has disturbed the orbits of the giant planets since the time of their formation.

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Figure 1: Cosmic billiards.

References

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  1. the Institute for Computational Astrophysics, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, B3H 3C3, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Joe Hahn

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  1. Joe Hahn
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Hahn, J. When giants roamed. Nature 435, 432–433 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/435432a

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