Solar System Chaos
Chaos theory isn't new to astronomers. Most have long known that the solar system does not "run with the precision of a Swiss watch." Astronomers have uncovered certain kinds of instabilities that occur throughout the solar system -- in the motions of Saturn's moon Hyperion, in gaps in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and in the orbits of the system's planets themselves. As used by astronomers, the word chaos denotes an abrupt change in some property of an object's orbit. An object behaving in a chaotic manner may, for example, have an orbital eccentricity that varies cyclically within certain limits for thousands or even millions of years, and then abruptly its pattern of variation changes. The result is a sharp break in the object's history -- its past behavior no longer says anything about its long-term future behavior. For centuries astronomers tried to compare the solar system to a gigantic clock around the sun. But they found that their equations never actually predicted the real planets' movement. This problem arises from two points, one theoretical, and the other, practical. The theoretical difficulty was summed up by the work of French mathematician Henri Poincare around the turn of this century. He demonstrated that while astronomers can easily predict how any two bodies -- Earth and the Moon, for example -- will travel around their common center of gravity, introducing a third gravitating body (such as another planet or the Sun) prevents a definitive analytical solution to the equations of motion. This makes the long-term evolution of the system impossible, in principle, to predict. The practical difficulty are the limits of computer power. Even with the help of calculators and desktop computers, the long-term calculations were too lengthy. The conclusion from all this is that while new real-life chaos discoveries are being made, current computing technology can not keep up with the pace.
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