The disruption of three-body gravitational systems: lifetime statistics

We investigate the statistics of the decay process in an 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 a 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.