3 ms·

Stable solutions to the 3-body problem were known centuries ago...but Phys.org couldn't resist adding "discovered" to their headline. The paper itself merely c

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• spwa4 2y ago
  A more correct term would be "saddle points". They're stable, until the tiniest of perturbations occurs, then they're not stable anymore.
  • bell-cot 2y ago
    That is true of some of them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point#Stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point#Stability - but famously not others - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_points#Sun%E2%80%93Jupiter_Lagrange_points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_po...
    • spwa4 2y ago
      Nope, true of all of them. They're massively large and pretty flat, so yes you can be in them for a "long" time. But still saddle points tiny perturbation will kick you out. It'll just take a while to get kicked out due to the shear size of these "points". They "capture" asteroids temporarily.
• gregw2 2y ago
  Yeah. For anyone interested in the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem For a fun animation of a bunch of solutions, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:5_4_800_36_downscaled.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:5_4_800_36_downscaled.gif