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arXiv · 1004.2506

Disruption of the three-body gravitational systems: Lifetime statistics

Victor Orlov·Alexey Rubinov·Ivan Shevchenko
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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.

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Victor Orlov, Alexey Rubinov, Ivan Shevchenko. 2010-04-14. Disruption of the three-body gravitational systems: Lifetime statistics. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17239.x

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