2023-09-18 04:00:13
The three-body problem, a formidable challenge in physics and mathematics, has just experienced a major breakthrough. An international team of mathematicians claims to have discovered no fewer than 12,000 new solutions to this more than 300-year-old puzzle.
Image credit: NASA
The three-body problem involves predicting the motion of three celestial objects in gravitational interaction. If the movement of two objects in orbit (In celestial mechanics, an orbit is the trajectory that a body draws in space…) can be described by simple equations, the addition of a third object (Generally speaking , the word object (from the Latin objectum, 1361) designates an entity defined in…) considerably complicates the calculations. Isaac Newton (Isaac Newton (January 4, 1643 G – March 31, 1727 G, or December 25…) laid the foundations of this problem more than 300 years ago, and mathematicians have been searching for solutions ever since. Ivan Hristov, mathematician at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, and his team used a supercomputer to find these new solutions. Unlike the simple orbit of our planet (A planet is a celestial body orbiting around the Sun or another star of…) around the sun (The Sun (Sol in Latin, Helios or Ήλιος in Greek) is the star…), the orbits in a three-body system can look like tangled spirals ((see talk page)). Objects move away and come together in a complex but predictable ballet.
These new solutions might be valuable for astronomers. Three-body systems are common in the Universe. However, the stability of these orbits remains to be verified. Juhan Frank, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, remains skeptical regarding their long-term stability.
According to Ivan Hristov, these solutions, stable or not, are of great theoretical interest. Their physical and astronomical relevance will be better known following more in-depth stability studies.
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