Gargantuan chaotic gravitational three-body systems and their irreversibility to the Planck length
| Autor: | S.F. Portegies Zwart, Mauri Valtonen, T. C. N. Boekholt |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Dynamical systems theory
Chaotic FOS: Physical sciences 01 natural sciences Power law 010305 fluids & plasmas Gravitation Total angular momentum quantum number 0103 physical sciences Statistical physics Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) 010303 astronomy & astrophysics Entropy (arrow of time) Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) Physics Astronomy and Astrophysics Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) Nonlinear Sciences - Chaotic Dynamics Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies Exponential function Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Space and Planetary Science Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) Chaotic Dynamics (nlin.CD) Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Physics - Computational Physics Planck length |
| Zdroj: | Monthly Notices of the RAS (0035-8711), 493(3), 3932-3937 |
| ISSN: | 1365-2966 0035-8711 |
| Popis: | 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. Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 7 pages, 4 figures |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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