Abstract
We describe a numerical procedure of integrating the equations of motion of the gravitational N-body problem, which has been successfully used for integrating systems with up to 500 stars. The method uses polynomials which typically include the fifth time-derivative of the acceleration. The time step varies with time and differs from star to star. A discussion of the observed range of individual time steps indicates a large gain in computational efficiency by using individual time steps instead of integrating all the equations with the same step size.
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© 1974 Springer-Verlag
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Wielen, R. (1974). On the numerical integration of the N-body problem for star clusters. In: Bettis, D.G. (eds) Proceedings of the Conference on the Numerical Solution of Ordinary Differential Equations. Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol 362. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0066596
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0066596
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