;
• Tsiganis, Kleomenis
;
• Crida, Aurélien
;
• Levison, Harold F.
;
• Gomes, Rodney

Abstract

We study the orbital evolution of the four giant planets of our solar system in a gas disk. Our investigation extends the previous works by Masset & Snellgrove and Morbidelli & Crida, which focused on the dynamics of the Jupiter-Saturn system. The only systems we found to reach a steady state are those in which the planets are locked in a quadruple mean-motion resonance (i.e., each planet is in resonance with its neighbor). In total, we found six such configurations. For the gas-disk parameters found in Morbidelli & Crida, these configurations are characterized by a negligible migration rate. After the disappearance of the gas, and in the absence of planetesimals, only two of these six configurations (the least compact ones) are stable for a time of hundreds of millions of years or more. The others become unstable on a timescale of a few Myr. Our preliminary simulations show that, when a planetesimal disk is added beyond the orbit of the outermost planet, the planets can evolve from the most stable of these configurations to their current orbits in a fashion qualitatively similar to that described in Tsiganis et al.