Three-body problem admits 13 new solutions

Science : When Isaac Newton defined his law of gravity, he used it to determine that two bodies orbiting each other will create an ellipse. It took more than 200 years before a German mathematician, Heinrich Bruns, determined that there was no general solution to describe the path of three bodies orbiting each other in a repeated pattern: Only specific solutions are possible. Since Bruns’s first solution, only two other families of orbits that solve the “three-body problem” have been found. Now, Milovan Å uvakov and Veljko DmitraÅ¡inoviÄ of the University of Belgrade in Serbia have used computer simulations to define an additional 13 unique solutions. Starting their simulations with the known solutions, they systematically adjusted the initial conditions until a new solution was found. Surprised by how many solutions they discovered, they had to create a new classification system for the solutions. They developed a “shape-sphere” that depicts where the bodies cannot go in their orbits and determines the relative distances between the bodies. Then the bodies were sorted based on symmetry and other characteristics. The next step will be to determine the stability of the solutions to see if any of the systems may be seen in observations of astronomical objects.