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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.

Figure 1. Chenciner-Montgomery figure-eight choreography of three equal point masses under Newtonian gravity in 2D (G = m_i = 1). Method: velocity-Verlet on the 6-DOF Hamiltonian from shared/js/engine/symplectic.js with pairwise gravitational acceleration.
orbit
dv 0.0000

WHAT TO TRY

  • Vary each control and watch the rail readouts respond.
  • Compare the diagnostic plot against the live scene.