Rare Event Sampling Improves Mercury Instability Statistics

Due to the chaotic nature of planetary dynamics, there is a non-zero probability that Mercury’s orbit will become unstable in the future. Previous efforts have estimated the probability of this happening between 3 and 5 billion years in the future using a large number of direct numerical simulations...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astrophysical journal Vol. 923; no. 2; pp. 236 - 244
Main Authors: Abbot, Dorian S., Webber, Robert J., Hadden, Sam, Seligman, Darryl, Weare, Jonathan
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Philadelphia The American Astronomical Society 01.12.2021
IOP Publishing
Subjects:
ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
Astrophysics
Computer simulation
Direct numerical simulation
Dynamic stability
Estimates
Instability
Mercury
Mercury (planet)
Numerical simulations
Orbital mechanics
Planetary dynamics
Sampling methods
Sampling techniques
ISSN:0004-637X, 1538-4357
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Due to the chaotic nature of planetary dynamics, there is a non-zero probability that Mercury’s orbit will become unstable in the future. Previous efforts have estimated the probability of this happening between 3 and 5 billion years in the future using a large number of direct numerical simulations with an N -body code, but were not able to obtain accurate estimates before 3 billion years in the future because Mercury instability events are too rare. In this paper we use a new rare-event sampling technique, Quantile Diffusion Monte Carlo (QDMC), to estimate that the probability of a Mercury instability event in the next 2 billion years is approximately 10 −4 in the REBOUND N -body code. We show that QDMC provides unbiased probability estimates at a computational cost of up to 100 times less than direct numerical simulation. QDMC is easy to implement and could be applied to many problems in planetary dynamics in which it is necessary to estimate the probability of a rare event.
Bibliography:AAS32684
The Solar System, Exoplanets, and Astrobiology
ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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content type line 14
SC0020427
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
ISSN:0004-637X
1538-4357
DOI:10.3847/1538-4357/ac2fa8