Flyby Encounters Between Two Planetary Systems

Stars born in clusters are subject to frequent stellar flybys and so are their planets. The influence of an encounter reaches beyond the brief flyby itself in that the mutual forcing between the planets will continue to shape the planetary system in the long term and in a way that is impossible without the encounter in the first place. As a consequence, different planetary systems of different orbital scales and mass ranges behave differently as a result of the encounters. Here we study the encounters between two planetary systems where each star has its own planets using N-body simulations. Besides the immediate effect of the encounter, we have also propagated the systems post-encounter for up to 10^8 yr. See Figure 1 for an illustration.We find that immediately during the encounter, a planet can be ejected from its original host star. Here, the interplanetary interactions are negligible and a planet’s stellar-centric distance is a key factor. Only encounters closer than a few times that distance can cause strong disturbances, e.g., to eject the planet or to break the resonance in multi-planet systems. This means that close-in (