Monte Carlo Simulations of Comet Capture from the Oort Cloud

There is a very large number of small bodies in the Solar System and their orbits are varied and complicated. Some types of orbits and events are so rare that they occur in numerical simulations only when millions or billions of orbits have been calculated. In order to study these orbits or events an efficient Monte Carlo simulation is useful. Here we describe a new Monte Carlo simulation method and test it against some existing simulations of orbits of small bodies which have been obtained by different methods. We find good agreement with many earlier calculations, and study briefly the possibility of the Oort Cloud capture origin of short period comets. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.