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Posted by David Williams on November 26, 2006, 11:15 am
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-> > He said that he couldn't set up a stable arrangement with more than
-> > three stars. I tried to show how this is possible.
-> But it's not possible.
-> IIRC, there's no Newtonian stable solution even
-> with 3 bodies, the solution is chaotic.
-> The net energy - is of course - conserved, however,
-> the system takes a path where 2 of the bodies
-> orbit more and more closely and supply kinetic
-> energy to the third which acquires the escape,
-> by sucking kinetic energy from the orbital energy
-> of the remaining pair. There is no such thing as
-> a stable *static* arrangement in our universe,
-> it's all dynamic.
-> Ken
A stable arrangement of four objects is possible if one is large, a
second smaller, and the other two much smaller and located at the two
"Trojan" points ahead of and behind the second.
The real sky contains many real systems of several stars, from binaries
to galaxies. In most cases in which there are small numbers (>2) of
stars, they don't all go around in more or less concentric orbits, like
the planets in our solar system. Often, they consist of close-orbiting
pairs, with other pairs much further away, and so on. While, in theory,
these systems may not be indefinitely stable (due to energy loss by
gravitational radiation, if nothing else), observation shows that, in
rality, they are nearly enough stable to have existed for billions of
years.
dow
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