Are long-term N-body simulations reliable?
Abstract
N-body integrations are used to model a wide range of astrophysical dynamics, but they suffer from errors which make their orbits diverge exponentially in time from the correct orbits. Over long time-scales, their reliability needs to be established. We address this reliability by running a three-body planetary system over about 200 e-folding times. Using nearby initial conditions, we can construct statistics of the long-term phase-space structure and compare to rough estimates of resonant widths of the system. We compared statistics for a wide range of numerical methods, including a Runge-Kutta method, Wisdom-Holman method, symplectic corrector methods, and a method by Laskar and Robutel. `Improving' an integrator did not increase the phase-space accuracy, but simply increasing the number of initial conditions did. In fact, the statistics of a higher order symplectic corrector method were inconsistent with the other methods in one test.
- Publication:
-
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Pub Date:
- April 2020
- DOI:
- 10.1093/mnras/staa388
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1910.08667
- Bibcode:
- 2020MNRAS.493.1913H
- Keywords:
-
- methods: numerical;
- celestial mechanics;
- planets and satellites: dynamical evolution and stability;
- globular clusters: general;
- Galaxy: kinematics and dynamics;
- galaxies: evolution;
- Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies;
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 14 pages, 13 figures, 4 tables. Matches accepted MNRAS version