Title:  New tools for calculating gravitational dynamics in the Solar System and exoplanetary systems

Abstract: 

I describe new tools and techniques I've built to solve different problems in gravitational dynamics.  First, I tackle the problem of the stability of the Solar System.  Although great progress has been made in the last decades towards an understanding of chaos and stability of the Solar System due to the development of modern computers, I show that all studies I found are affected by numerical chaos, which causes artificial Solar System chaos and instability.  I discuss our current work to calculate Solar System stability, and in particular Mercury's future trajectory, without the effects of numerical chaos.

I next describe a suite of tools, including powerful new Kepler solvers and new symplectic integrators and their tangent equations.  Unlike other popular methods, we can solve planetary systems with arbitrary geometries and orbits including moons.  We have implemented these tools to solve the transit timing variation problem, and derive the properties and possible compositions of TRAPPIST-1 planets.  Some of this work has been incorporated in the Rebound code.

Finally, I describe new tools for the potential discovery of interstellar objects (IOs).  The tools solve the linking problem, in which independent observations are linked together as a potential object of interest, using crude approximations.  These objects are then validated using state of the art orbit fitters.  I describe the validation tests I've done with this pipeline, which so far has found no conclusive IOs.

Host:  Jason Wright

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