Time-reversible timestepping in many-body planetary systems

Simulating chaotic planetary system evolution requires resolving small time-scales due to close encounters, scattering, collisions, and more. Simulations typically assign fixed timesteps to all particles, however, which is inefficient and wastes compute resources in a chaotically evolving system; moreover, it may under-resolve the simulation. Hybrid methods are a blunt tool for resolving small time-scales as they do not allow for fine-grained adaptation. Assigning individual timesteps, which vary in time, to planetary bodies usually violates desirable properties such as symplecticity and reversibility. In this work, we develop an "almost" exactly time-reversible direct N-body integrator, MTR, in which each pair of planets gets its own timestep, which itself can vary as the system evolves. In contrast to our previous work, we achieve this adaptation on the fly, independent of a global timestep. We provide a C version of the code and test it on several problems, demonstrating no energy error drift, as expected of a reversible method. At large particle numbers, up to N = 975, we compare against the state-of-the-art GPLUM code, which we can use in direct Hermite mode (for which it is not optimized) or tree mode (for which it is). MTR provides a speedup of up to two orders of magnitude compared to the Hermite mode, while agreeing with the distribution of orbits. In our default configuration, MTR's speed matches or improves on the tree mode's speed, by up to an order magnitude, despite the tree mode's faster and approximate force calculation.