The dynamical decay of unstable 4-body systems

Unstable 4-body systems with negative energy can ultimately decay to (1) a binary plus two single stars, (2) two separate binaries, or (3) a stable triple plus a single star. One hundred random 2-dimensional and one hundred random 3-dimensional 4-body systems have been numerically integrated to determine the statistics of the end products. Of the final stable triples and binaries, 19% were triples, which agrees well with observational estimates of the ratio of triples to binaries. The results were essentially the same for 2- and 3- dimensional systems.