Gargantuan chaotic gravitational three-body systems and their irreversibility to the Planck length
by
Sala de Conferências
Departamento de Física FCTUC
Chaos is present in most stellar dynamical systems and manifests itself through the exponential growth of small perturbations.
We perform an ensemble of three-body experiments, and measure the rate of exponential divergence. We find that five percent of triple black holes with zero angular momentum can magnify an initial perturbation smaller than the Planck length to macroscopic sizes within their lifetime. This renders these triples fundamentally unpredictable, warranting a statistical approach.
We investigate the statistical reliability of N-body experiments, e.g. the individual outcomes have numerically diverged, but the statistical distributions of for example binary separation and escaper speeds are nevertheless robust, a phenomenon we call "Nagh-Hoch".
Filipe Veloso e Pedro Costa
