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Access through your institution Buy or subscribe A cluster of more than 100 stars in the Galactic Centre called the ‘S stars’ move visibly along their trajectories on human timescales.
Predicting their movements with a high degree of accuracy is challenging due to a large number of close encounters, which induce perturbations that cause abrupt changes in orbital energies.
Simon Portegies Zwart and colleagues have performed a suite of high-precision _N_-body calculations without round-off errors for the orbits of 27 members of the S-star cluster, but find
that, due to the inherent chaos of the system, solutions are not accurate beyond ~500 years into the future. In comparison, the orbits of most Solar System bodies are predictable with
confidence on a 12-million-year timescale. The researchers find that, over many runs of the same Newtonian model with slightly different initial conditions (such as displacing a star by 15 m
in a particular direction), it is the close encounters between stars that drive the uncertainty in the predictions. Gravitational interactions between two or three nearby stars lead to
slightly different stellar orbits, which produce a different ‘push’ on the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole. This push in turn is transmitted to all stars in the cluster, leading
to positions that differ by up to 40 au in different configurations of the model. In this situation the chaotic behaviour is driven by ‘instantaneous’ events — ‘punctuated chaos’, using the
authors’ term — rather than being resonance-driven. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution ACCESS OPTIONS Access through your institution Access Nature and 54
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AUTHORS AND AFFILIATIONS * Nature Astronomy https://www.nature.com/natastron/ Paul Woods Authors * Paul Woods View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google
Scholar CORRESPONDING AUTHOR Correspondence to Paul Woods. RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE Woods, P. Chaos reigns. _Nat Astron_ 7, 1147
(2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02110-w Download citation * Published: 06 October 2023 * Issue Date: October 2023 * DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02110-w SHARE THIS
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