  We present a qualitative diagnostic based on the continuous wavelet
transform, for the detection of irregular behavior in time series of particle
simulations. We apply the method to three qualitatively different gravitational
3-body encounters. The intrinsic irregular behavior of these encounters is well
reproduced by the presented method, and we show that the method accurately
identifies the irregular regime in these encounters. We also provide an
instantaneous quantification for the degree of irregularity in these
simulations. Furthermore we demonstrate how the method can be used to analyze
larger systems by applying it to simulations with 100-particles. It turns out
that the number of stars on irregular orbits is systematically larger for
clusters in which all stars have the same mass compared to a multimass system.
The proposed method provides a quick and sufficiently accurate diagnostic for
identifying stars on irregular orbits in large scale N-body simulations.

Astrophysics