The stability of the Solar System is a subject of much inquiry in astronomy. Though the planets have been stable historically, and will be in the short term, their weak gravitational effects on one another can add up in unpredictable ways. For this reason (among others) the Solar System is stated to be chaotic, and even the most precise long-term models for the orbital motion of the Solar System are not valid over more than a few tens of millions of years.
The Solar System is stable in human terms, in that none of the planets will collide with each other or be ejected from the system in the next few billion years, and the Earth's orbit will be relatively stable.
Since Newton's law of gravitation (1687), mathematicians and astronomers (such as Laplace, Lagrange, Gauss, Poincaré, Kolmogorov, Vladimir Arnold and Jürgen Moser) have searched for evidence for the stability of the planetary motions, and this quest led to many mathematical developments, and several successive 'proofs' of stability for the Solar System.
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—David Hume (1711–1776)
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