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>What they find is that after switching off general relativity the Solar System goes unstable shortly thereafter. Not my field, and I only glanced at the figur
by fbdab103 4y ago
>What they find is that after switching off general relativity the Solar System goes unstable shortly thereafter.
Not my field, and I only glanced at the figures, but I think "shortly thereafter" is something only a cosmologist could say without blushing. Unless I completely bungled the meaning (very plausible), the paper is using time on the scale of billions of years.
- lloeki 4y agoI guess the timescale was picked up to match the expected end of Sol's main sequence (in ~5 billion years) and its growth into a planet-engulfing red giant, in which case continuing with the model beyond the next order of magnitude becomes unrealistic. IIUC the instability time scatter plot shows that GR basically stabilises our local N body problem by one to two orders of magnitude in time scale (10^8~10^8.5 vs 10^9~10^10), IOW giving a 900~9000Myr extra vs being derailed by a Mercury-Venus collision in ~100Myr, which would indeed comparatively be "shortly thereafter" at these timescales. I did chuckle at the phrasing though. (Disclaimer: not my field either, so I may be 10^10 wrong)
- antognini 4y agoHah, fair. As an astronomer I don't really blink when someone says that 100 million years is a short time period.