Physicists Discover a Whopping 13 New Solutions to Three-Body Problem

After seeing the animations and reading the article, I am somewhat skeptical about the stability of these orbits. They are rather long and have plenty of near-misses. Even if they are stable in the sense of a pure 3 body problem, at close distances stars don't behave as point objects anymore. Instead, you have things like tidal forces and matter around stars.<p>Additionally, all the near misses makes it difficult to calculate the orbits, even with variable step size.

If you want to go directly to a visualization of the solutions: <a href="http://suki.ipb.ac.rs/3body/" rel="nofollow">http://suki.ipb.ac.rs/3body/</a>

"What we did was the most simple-minded thing that you could do," Dmitrašinović says. "We were shocked when we discovered all these things, and we were even more shocked when we discovered that they had not been discovered before us."

As someone with an undergraduate level education in physics I find this stuff pretty cool. Having a number of homework exercises for my graduate level classical mechanics courses end with the fact that the solution degenerates into a three-body problem, and therefore an unsurmountable task, this kind of news gives me hope :)

Is there any simulation online where I can just click to add planets and watch them move around each other? It's surprisingly relaxing...

Those are some awesome orbits. There don't seem to be any solutions where all three bodies are in the ecliptic? If so does that mean we would only see these in the wild in a planet/star "capture" situation?

Wow, that text scrolls slowly...

when it rains, it pours.