论Elon Musk的特斯拉千万年间与太阳系星体的相撞概率

记得Elon Musk发推说特斯拉可能会在轨道上待上个数十亿年么,各种新闻还就按照这数字转载了呢。个人感觉Musk这数字只是随口一说,甚至都没怎么进行过估算,单纯因为星体碰撞是小概率时间就给了个很长的时间吧。而如果我们真的算一算,结果又会是怎么样呢?
是的,这是一篇正儿八经的学术论文哟(虽然更像是天文学家兴趣【无聊】的产物),不是标题党哟~(虽然不是我写的就是了)今天早上看到这篇论文之间笑出声。有兴趣的可以去arxiv上看原文哈,arxiv id:1802.04718v1
原文的标题为 The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets,下面为原文的摘要:
ABSTRACT
On February 6th, 2018 SpaceX launched a Tesla Roadster on a Mars-crossing orbit. We perform N-body simulations to determine the fate of the object over the next several million years, under the relevant perturbations acting on the orbit. The orbital evolution is initially dominated by close encounters with the Earth. The first close encounter with the Earth will occur in 2091. The repeated encounters lead to a random walk that eventually causes close encounters with other terrestrial planets and the Sun. Long-term integrations become highly sensitive to the initial conditions after several such close encounters. By running a large ensemble of simulations with slightly perturbed initial conditions, we estimate the probability of a collision with Earth and Venus over the next one million years to be 6% and 2.5%, respectively. We estimate the dynamical lifetime of the Tesla to be a few tens of millions of years.
Key words: methods: numerical — gravitation — planets and satellites: dynamical evolution and stability
大意来说就是spaceX在2月6号发射了一辆特斯拉进入越火星轨道,根据现有的轨道观察,作者们进行了未来轨道的数值模拟。因为2091会出现的第一次近邻地球以及未来会出现的数次近邻行星,所以长期的轨道预测会是典型的初值敏感问题(说混沌或者蝴蝶效益的话可能明白的人更多)。为此,多个初值微扰的情况下做了长期数值模拟,并已最后的统计结构对特斯拉在未来数百万年间会与其他太阳系主要星体碰撞的概率作了预测。其中一百万年内碰撞发生概率在2.5%至6%之间,预计特斯拉从力学学角度来看的寿命会达数千万年。
另外附上文章内结论的图,碰撞概率作为时间的函数。

看起来,虽然Musk只是随口一说,离好好的计算结果相差也不是特别远呢~(两个数量级放在天文研究里面只能算正常的误差)
你觉得这种研究是不是很有趣呢?还是显得很奇葩呢?评论区写下你的感想吧。