I don't know whether I actually posted my conjecture a few years ago when the "hey-for-three" solution was discovered. I'm not sure how to rigorize the conjecture, but I am convinced that there is an at-least-countably-infinite family of such stable (using the word in the usual sense, pace Warren) configurations. Basically, if you start off three bodies in a random way, then the system might spend some energy to eject one of the three, but if it doesn't, the system will eventually come very close to one of its previous configurations; if it does, then you can construct a stable solution by tiny perturbations. Most of these stable modes are extremely shallow potential wells. On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 5:25 PM, Cris Moore <moore@santafe.edu> wrote:
You may enjoy these orbits as well: http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0511219v2.pdf
Cris
On Mar 9, 2013, at 1:23 PM, Ray Tayek wrote:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/03/09/1846253/physicists-discover-13-ne...
Posted by <http://unknownlamer.org/>Unknown Lamer on Saturday March 09,
@02:33PM
from the mystical-spheres dept. sciencehabit writes "It's the sort of abstract puzzle that keeps a scientist awake at night: Can you predict how three objects will orbit each other in a repeating pattern? In the 300 years since this '< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem>three-body problem' was first recognized, just three families of solutions have been found. Now, < http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/03/physicists-discover-a-whopping.html>two physicists have discovered 13 new families. It's quite a feat in mathematical physics, and it could conceivably help astrophysicists understand new planetary systems." The <http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0181>paper is available at arxiv.
--- co-chair http://ocjug.org/
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
Cristopher Moore Professor, Santa Fe Institute
The Nature of Computation Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens Available now at all good bookstores, or through Oxford University Press http://www.nature-of-computation.org/
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun