A Statistical Treatment of Low-N Systems

Abstract

The long-term evolution of N-body systems with high N (>10⁴) cannot yet be studied by direct integration of the equations of motion. Instead, the study of systems with smaller N can give insight into the higher N limit in two ways. First, we can measure the dependence on N of all quantities of interest for a range of N-values, and extrapolate the results to higher N. Second, even a very high-N system will eventually undergo core collapse, at which point the central dynamics will be dominated by a subset of stars with small N (10–100).