Dynamical Stability Inside the Habitable Zone of 55 CNC and υ And

Funk, Barbara (2006) Dynamical Stability Inside the Habitable Zone of 55 CNC and υ And. In: 4th Austrian-Hungarian Workshop on Celestial Mechanics Edited by Á. Süli, F. Freistetter, A. Pál. Publications of the Astronomy Department of the Eötvös University (18). ELTE Sokszorosítóüzeme, Budapest, pp. 75-83.

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Abstract

The main goal of this study is to investigate the long term stability of orbits of terrestrial like planets in the habitable zone (HZ) of the extrasolar systems 55 Cnc and υ And. The habitable zone is defined as the region, where liquid water can exist on the surface of a terrestrial planet. From the dynamical point of view the most interesting planetary systems are multiple planetary systems, to which the two planetary systems belong, since they have at least three known exoplanets. To determine the orbital behavior in the different systems we used (a) direct numerical computations (Lie-Integration method), where we determined the escape-times and the maximum eccentricity (MEM) and (b) for the long term stability the FLI, which is an effective chaos indicator. Because of the uncertainties in the observational data for the initial conditions we varied the eccentricity of the known planets as well as the inclination of the test-planets. For the system 55 Cnc we found a very stable HZ more or less independent of the eccentricity of 55 Cnc d and up to an eccentricity of 0.38 of 55 Cnc c. For higher eccentricities of 55 Cnc c the whole system becomes unstable. The system υ And has a nearly completely unstable HZ for all initial conditions.

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