Effect of Initial Inclination to the Stability of Triple Star Systems

A triple star system consists of a closer (inner) binary and another farther (outer) component orbiting the closer binary. The stability of such triple star systems has been of interest to many authors. In one of the studies, it is found that the instability of triple stars system is also determined by its critical period ratio (outer/inner), beside its mass ratio. In this study, they considered stars of mass 0.01 - 100 solar mass, with mass ratio range of 1 - 100. By using MERCURY code, we extend their work to study the effects of initial inclination to the stability of the systems. The code validation results in an agreement with their results, i.e the bigger the period ratio of a system from its critical period ratio, the system will tend to be more stable. In this paper, we report the results of our simulations which have been performed to see how initial inclination affects the stability of a system. A grid of three initial parameters (distance, inclination, and phase) has been used to initiate the simulations. We conclude that the bigger the outer binary's inclination, the system will be more stable.