Charles Beck edited section_The_Simulation_Process_Holman__.tex  about 9 years ago

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\begin{equation}  \mu= \frac{m_2}{(m_1 + m_2)},  \end{equation}  increases from $ \mu=10^-6 \mu=10^{-6}  \to \mu \simeq 0.3$ the dimensionless radius for stability of the orbiting planet increases exponentially from $r=1 \to r=2.4$ where the radius quickly decreases \cite{Szebehely_1984}. This means the more similar the two stars are in mass, the larger the planet must be to remain stable. Knowing that, Holman and Wiegert then describe their simulation. They use an elliptic restricted three body system where the planets are test particles that do not interact with each other so the simulation can be done with multiple varying planets at the same time. During simulation, they look for "close encounters" --- which they define as a passage within 0.25 of binary separation --- and for escape orbits. So any test particle that comes too close or too far away from the stars are deemed unstable and removed from the integration. They then determine what they call the critical semimajor axis which is the "semimajor axis at which the test particles at all initial longitudes survived the full integration time."  They ran this simulation for many orbit shapes varying from perfectly circular to eccentricities of 0.8.