A Statistical Stability Analysis of Earth‐like Planetary Orbits in Binary Systems

This paper explores the stability of an Earth-like planet orbiting asolar-mass star in the presence of a stellar companion using ~ 400,000numerical integrations. Given the chaotic nature of the systems beingconsidered, we perform a statistical analysis of the ensuing dynamics for ~500orbital configurations defined by the following set of orbital parameters: thecompanion mass; the companion eccentricity; the companion periastron; and theplanet's inclination angle relative to the stellar binary plane. Specifically,we generate a large sample of survival times for each orbital configurationthrough the numerical integration of N >> 1 equivalent experiments (e.g., withthe same orbital parameters but randomly selected initial orbital phases). Wethen construct distributions of survival time using the variable mu_s = logtau_s (where tau_s is in years) for each orbital configuration. The primaryobjective of this work is twofold. First, we use the mean of the distributionsto gain a better understanding of what orbital configurations, while unstable,have sufficiently long survival times to make them interesting to the study ofplanet habitability. Second, we calculate the width, skew, and kurtosis of eachmu_s distribution and look for general features that may aid furtherunderstanding and numerical exploration of these chaotic systems.Comment: accepted for publication in PAS