Abstract
Over the past three decades, we have witnessed one of the great revolutions in our understanding of the cosmos—the dawn of the Exoplanet Era. Where once we knew of just one planetary system (the solar system), we now know of thousands, with new systems being announced on a weekly basis. Of the thousands of planetary systems we have found to date, however, there is only one that we can study up-close and personal—the solar system. In this review, we describe our current understanding of the solar system for the exoplanetary science community—with a focus on the processes thought to have shaped the system we see today. In section one, we introduce the solar system as a single well studied example of the many planetary systems now observed. In section two, we describe the solar system's small body populations as we know them today—from the two hundred and five known planetary satellites to the various populations of small bodies that serve as a reminder of the system's formation and early evolution. In section three, we consider our current knowledge of the solar system's planets, as physical bodies. In section four we discuss the research that has been carried out into the solar system's formation and evolution, with a focus on the information gleaned as a result of detailed studies of the system's small body populations. In section five, we discuss our current knowledge of planetary systems beyond our own—both in terms of the planets they host, and in terms of the debris that we observe orbiting their host stars. As we learn ever more about the diversity and ubiquity of other planetary systems, our solar system will remain the key touchstone that facilitates our understanding and modeling of those newly found systems, and we finish section five with a discussion of the future surveys that will further expand that knowledge.
Highlights
Prior to the discovery of the first planets around other stars (Gamma Cephei Ab and HD 114762b, initially thought to be brown dwarfs (Campbell et al, 1988; Latham et al, 1989); the planets orbiting pulsars PSR 1257+12 (Wolszczan & Frail, 1992) and PSR B1620-26 (Thorsett, Arzoumanian & Taylor, 1993); and 51 Pegasi, the first planet around a Sun-like star (Mayor & Queloz, 1995)), our ideas on how planetary systems formed and evolved were based purely on observations of the Solar system
Where once we knew of just one planetary system, we know of thousands, with new systems being announced on a weekly basis
We describe the Solar system’s small body populations as we know them today from the two hundred and five known planetary satellites to the various populations of small bodies that serve as a reminder of the system's formation and early evolution
Summary
Prior to the discovery of the first planets around other stars (Gamma Cephei Ab and HD 114762b, initially thought to be brown dwarfs (Campbell et al, 1988; Latham et al, 1989); the planets orbiting pulsars PSR 1257+12 (Wolszczan & Frail, 1992) and PSR B1620-26 (Thorsett, Arzoumanian & Taylor, 1993); and 51 Pegasi, the first planet around a Sun-like star (Mayor & Queloz, 1995)), our ideas on how planetary systems formed and evolved were based purely on observations of the Solar system. The Centaurs, in turn, are thought to have their origins primarily in the trans-Neptunian population, with the main sources thought to be the Scattered Disc (e.g. Duncan & Levison, 1997; Di Sisto & Brunini, 2007; Volk & Malhotra, 2008), the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt (e.g. Levison & Duncan, 1997; Lowry et al, 2008; Volk & Malhotra, 2013), the Plutinos (e.g. di Sisto, Brunini & de Elía, 2010) and the Neptune and Jovian Trojans (e.g. Horner & Lykawka, 2010a; Horner, Lykawka & Müller, 2012; Di Sisto, Ramos & Gallardo, 2019), it seems likely that there is at least some contribution from objects originating in the inner Oort cloud (Emel'yanenko, Asher & Bailey, 2005; Brasser et al, 2012a; de la Fuente Marcos & de la Fuente Marcos, 2014) Both the Centaurs and Jupiter-family comets are dynamically unstable on timescales much shorter than the age of the Solar system, and so must be continually replenished from those reservoirs in order to maintain the populations we see today (e.g. Duncan et al, 1988; Duncan & Levison, 1997; Levison & Duncan, 1997; Horner et al, 2004a,b; Pál et al, 2015; Grazier et al, 2018; Grazier, Horner & CastilloRogez, 2019). We present detailed reviews of many of the processes thought to have occurred during planetary formation, together with those that continue to the current day, and highlight a number of theories put forward to explain the various features of our system as a whole
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