Chaotic motion and ballistic ejection of gravitating shells

Abstract

It is shown that during the motion of two initially gravitationally bound spherical shells, consisting of point particles moving along ballistic trajectories, one of the shell may be expelled to infinity at subrelativistic speed $v_{exp}\leq 0.25 c$. The problem is solved in Newtonian gravity. Motion of two intersecting shells in the case when they do not runaway shows a chaotic behaviour. We hope that this toy and oversimplyfied model can give nevertheless a qualitative idea on the nature of the mechanism of matter outbursts from the dense stellar clusters.