Aspects of the planetary Birkhoff normal form

Abstract

The discovery in [G. Pinzari. PhD thesis. Univ. Roma Tre. 2009], [L. Chierchia and G. Pinzari, Invent. Math. 2011] of the Birkhoff normal form for the planetary many--body problem opened new insights and hopes for the comprehension of the dynamics of this problem. Remarkably, it allowed to give a {\sl direct} proof of the celebrated Arnold's Theorem [V. I. Arnold. Uspehi Math. Nauk. 1963] on the stability of planetary motions. In this paper, using a "ad hoc" set of symplectic variables, we develop an asymptotic formula for this normal form that may turn to be useful in applications. As an example, we provide two very simple applications to the three-body problem: we prove a conjecture by [V. I. Arnold. cit] on the "Kolmogorov set"of this problem and, using Nehoro{\v{s}}ev Theory [Nehoro{\v{s}}ev. Uspehi Math. Nauk. 1977], we prove, in the planar case, stability of all planetary actions over exponentially-long times, provided mean--motion resonances are excluded. We also briefly discuss perspectives and problems for full generalization of the results in the paper.