We investigate statistics of the decay process in the equal-mass three-body
problem with randomized initial conditions. Contrary to earlier expectations of
similarity with "radioactive decay", the lifetime distributions obtained in our
numerical experiments turn out to be heavy-tailed, i.e. the tails are not
exponential, but algebraic. The computed power-law index for the differential
distribution is within the narrow range, approximately from -1.7 to -1.4,
depending on the virial coefficient. Possible applications of our results to
studies of the dynamics of triple stars known to be at the edge of disruption
are considered.Comment: 13 pages, 2 tables, 3 figure
