Disruption of the three-body gravitational systems: Lifetime statistics

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.