Three-body figure-eight choreography
Three equal masses interact under Newtonian gravity in 2D. At the
Chenciner-Montgomery initial condition (2000), all three masses chase one
another along a single closed figure-eight curve with period T ≈ 6.326.
The velocity-Verlet integrator from shared/js/engine/symplectic.js
preserves total energy to a part-in-a-million bound and total linear and
angular momentum to machine precision. The "dv" slider perturbs the initial
velocity of body 3 by a small amount; at dv = 0 the choreography is stable,
and at dv = 0.01 the system slowly drifts off the closed curve.
shared/js/engine/symplectic.js with
pairwise gravitational acceleration.
orbit
dv
0.0000
dv: 0.0000
E: 0.000000
|dE/E|: 0.0e+00
|P|: 0.0e+00
L: 0.0e+00
t: 0.00
0.00000.0000000.0e+000.0e+000.0e+000.00WHAT TO TRY
- Vary each control and watch the rail readouts respond.
- Compare the diagnostic plot against the live scene.