When do star clusters become multiple star systems? II. Towards a half-life formalism with four bodies
| Autor: | Teresa Panurach, Nathan W. C. Leigh, Taeho Ryu, Timur Ibragimov, Rosalba Perna |
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| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
Physics
Point particle Classical Physics (physics.class-ph) FOS: Physical sciences Astronomy and Astrophysics Physics - Classical Physics 01 natural sciences Microscopic scale Gravitation Star cluster Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Space and Planetary Science Macroscopic scale Globular cluster 0103 physical sciences Statistical physics Decay product 010306 general physics 010303 astronomy & astrophysics Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) Radioactive decay |
| Zdroj: | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 477:4213-4227 |
| ISSN: | 1365-2966 0035-8711 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/mnras/sty712 |
| Popis: | We present a half-life formalism for describing the disruption of gravitationally-bound few-body systems, with a focus on binary-binary scattering. For negative total encounter energies, the four-body problem has three possible decay products in the point particle limit. For each decay product and a given set of initial conditions, we obtain directly from numerical scattering simulations the half-life for the distribution of disruption times. As in radioactive decay, the half-lives should provide a direct prediction for the relative fractions of each decay product. We test this prediction with simulated data and find good agreement with our hypothesis. We briefly discuss applications of this feature of the gravitational four-body problem to populations of black holes in globular clusters. This paper, the second in the series, builds on extending the remarkable similarity between gravitational chaos at the macroscopic scale and radioactive decay at the microscopic scale to larger-N systems. 17 pages, 18 figures, 2 tables; accepted for publication in MNRAS |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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