Open AccessArticle
Disruption of Planetary System Architectures by Stellar Flybys
by
Robert Przyłuski, Hans Rickman, Paweł Wajer, Tomasz Wiśniowski, Diego Turrini, Danae Polychroni, Camilla Danielski, J. M. Diederik Kruijssen, Steven Longmore and Mélanie Chevance
Universe 2025, 11(8), 240; https://doi.org/10.3390/universe11080240 (registering DOI) - 22 Jul 2025
Abstract
We investigate the survivability of solar system-like planetary systems during close encounters in stellar associations using a suite of 1980 N-body simulations. Each system is based on one of the possible five-planet resonant configurations proposed to represent the initial solar system architecture and
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We investigate the survivability of solar system-like planetary systems during close encounters in stellar associations using a suite of 1980 N-body simulations. Each system is based on one of the possible five-planet resonant configurations proposed to represent the initial solar system architecture and is systematically scaled in both planetary mass and orbital compactness to explore the parameter space of observed exoplanetary architectures. Simulations explore a range of stellar encounter scenarios drawn from four distinct cluster environments. Our results show that system survival depends critically on the interplay between planetary mass and orbital scale: compact configurations are more resistant to external perturbations, while increased planetary mass improves resilience only up to a threshold, beyond which internal instabilities dominate. No system whose planets are twice as massive as the ones in the solar system survives stellar encounters. Systems that are at least an order of magnitude more compact than the solar system remain stable under typical encounter conditions. These findings place strong constraints on the initial architectures of planetary systems that can endure stellar-dense birth environments.
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