English

Long-term planetary integration with individual time steps

Astrophysics 2009-10-22 v1

Abstract

We describe an algorithm for long-term planetary orbit integrations, including the dominant post-Newtonian effects, that employs individual timesteps for each planet. The algorithm is symplectic and exhibits short-term errors that are O(ϵΩ2τ2)O(\epsilon\Omega^2\tau^2) where τ\tau is the timestep, Ω\Omega is a typical orbital frequency, and ϵ1\epsilon\ll1 is a typical planetary mass in solar units. By a special starting procedure long-term errors over an integration interval TT can be reduced to O(ϵ2Ω3τ2T)O(\epsilon^2\Omega^3\tau^2T). A sample 0.8 Myr integration of the nine planets illustrates that Pluto can have a timestep more than 100 times Mercury's, without dominating the positional error. Our algorithm is applicable to other NN-body systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9403057,
  title  = {Long-term planetary integration with individual time steps},
  author = {Prasenjit Saha and Scott Tremaine},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9403057},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

23 pages, uuencoded postscript file, CITA 94-666