Dynamics of the Giant Planets of the Solar System in the Gaseous Protoplanetary Disk and Their Relationship to the Current Orbital Architecture

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.