Rare Event Sampling Improves Mercury Instability Statistics
Abstract
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 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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2106.09091,
title = {Rare Event Sampling Improves Mercury Instability Statistics},
author = {Dorian S. Abbot and Robert J. Webber and Sam Hadden and Darryl Seligman and Jonathan Weare},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.09091},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Abbot et al 2021 ApJ 923 236