The decay of triple systems

Martynova, A. I.; Орлов, В. В.

doi:10.1134/s1063772914100084

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…We extend the initial condition space from the Pythagorean problem to the homology map of Agekyan & Anosova (1967, 1968) (see also Anosova & Nebukin (1991); Anosova (1991); Anosova et al (1994);Tanikawa et al (1995); Martynova & Orlov (2014);Orlov et al (2016)). For a definition and visualization of this map, see Fig.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gargantuan chaotic gravitational three-body systems and their irreversibility to the Planck length

Boekholt

Zwart

Valtonen

2020

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Chaos is present in most stellar dynamical systems and manifests itself through the exponential growth of small perturbations. Exponential divergence drives time irreversibility and increases the entropy in the system. A numerical consequence is that integrations of the N-body problem unavoidably magnify truncation and rounding errors to macroscopic scales. Hitherto, a quantitative relation between chaos in stellar dynamical systems and the level of irreversibility remained undetermined. In this work we study chaotic three-body systems in free fall initially using the accurate and precise N-body code Brutus, which goes beyond standard double-precision arithmetic. We demonstrate that the fraction of irreversible solutions decreases as a power law with numerical accuracy. This can be derived from the distribution of amplification factors of small initial perturbations. Applying this result to systems consisting of three massive black holes with zero total angular momentum, we conclude that up to five percent of such triples would require an accuracy of smaller than the Planck length in order to produce a time-reversible solution, thus rendering them fundamentally unpredictable.

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