New answers tagged stability
5
This is something I played with while testing a n-body code I wrote during college. Unfortunately I don't have any animations, or even the original code anymore - but I can report qualitative results.
Removing Jupiter and Saturn does indeed have a significant destabilizing effect -- an a chaotic one at that (i.e. depending on precise initial conditions, ...
3
Your confusion comes from the oft-made, but not strictly true, assumption that global potential energy minima must be deep local minima. Stability is a function of the local depth of a potential energy well in a potential curve, and excited states in atoms/molecules have different potential curves, above those of their ground states. It is however possible ...
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