Disruption of the three-body gravitational systems: Lifetime statistics

Abstract

We investigate statistics of the decay process in the equal-mass three-body problem with randomized initial conditions. Contrary to earlier expectations of similarity with "radioactive decay", the lifetime distributions obtained in our numerical experiments turn out to be heavy-tailed, i.e. the tails are not exponential, but algebraic. The computed power-law index for the differential distribution is within the narrow range, approximately from -1.7 to -1.4, depending on the virial coefficient. Possible applications of our results to studies of the dynamics of triple stars known to be at the edge of disruption are considered.

13 pages, 2 tables, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• On universality of algebraic decays in Hamiltonian systems
• Hamiltonian intermittency and Lévy flights in the three-body problem
• Correlation of macroscopic instability and Lyapunov times in the general three-body problem
• On the relationship between instability and Lyapunov times for the 3-body problem

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• Testing the Flux-based statistical prediction of the Three-Body Problem
• Illustrating chaos: A schematic discretization of the general three-body problem in Newtonian gravity
• Isles of regularity in a sea of chaos amid the gravitational three-body problem
• When does a star cluster become a multiple star system? I. Lifetimes of equal-mass small-N systems