0000000000171809
AUTHOR
Ivan I. Shevchenko
Dynamical environments of MU69: a state of chaotic clearing
AbstractThe second (after Pluto) plausible target object for the New Horizons mission is 2014 MU69. It is a classical TNO, a primordial contact binary. Identifying any material in the vicinities of a target object is of an especial concern for planning cosmic fly-byes, as it is hazardous for a space probe. Luckily, no such material has been reported for MU69 up to now. The point of our report is that this lucky absence is just a dynamical consequence of the physical nature of MU69. Spinning gravitating dumbbells create zones of dynamical chaos around them, and this has a clearing effect: any material put in orbits around a rotating dumbbell (e.g., any material ejected from its surface) cann…
Chaotic dynamics around cometary nuclei
We apply a generalized Kepler map theory to describe the qualitative chaotic dynamics around cometary nuclei, based on accessible observational data for five comets whose nuclei are well-documented to resemble dumb-bells. The sizes of chaotic zones around the nuclei and the Lyapunov times of the motion inside these zones are estimated. In the case of Comet 1P/Halley, the circumnuclear chaotic zone seems to engulf an essential part of the Hill sphere, at least for orbits of moderate to high eccentricity.
Massive evaluation and analysis of Poincar�� recurrences on grids of initial data: a tool to map chaotic diffusion
We present a novel numerical method aimed to characterize global behaviour, in particular chaotic diffusion, in dynamical systems. It is based on an analysis of the Poincar\'e recurrence statistics on massive grids of initial data or values of parameters. We concentrate on Hamiltonian systems, featuring the method separately for the cases of bounded and non-bounded phase spaces. The embodiments of the method in each of the cases are specific. We compare the performances of the proposed Poincar\'e recurrence method (PRM) and the custom Lyapunov exponent (LE) methods and show that they expose the global dynamics almost identically. However, a major advantage of the new method over the known g…
Dynamical environments of relativistic binaries: The phenomenon of resonance shifting
In this article, we explore both numerically and analytically how the dynamical environments of mildly relativistic binaries evolve with increasing the general relativity factor $\gamma$ (the normalized inverse of the binary size measured in the units of the gravitational radius corresponding to the total mass of the system). Analytically, we reveal a phenomenon of the relativistic shifting of mean-motion resonances: on increasing $\gamma$, the resonances between the test particle and the central binary shift, due to the relativistic variation of the mean motions of the primary and secondary binaries and the relativistic advance of the tertiary's pericenter. To exhibit the circumbinary dyna…
Massive evaluation and analysis of Poincaré recurrences
We present a novel numerical method aimed to characterize global behaviour, in particular chaotic diffusion, in dynamical systems. It is based on an analysis of the Poincaré recurrence statistics on massive grids of initial data or values of parameters. We concentrate on Hamiltonian systems, featuring the method separately for the cases of bounded and non-bounded phase spaces. The embodiments of the method in each of the cases are specific. This new method allows one to construct, in some approximation, charts of local diffusion timescales.