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Posted by danielmorozoff 2 days ago

An atlas of periodic solutions to the three-body problem(www.threebodyorbits.com)
268 points | 61 commentspage 2
hakuseki 4 hours ago|
I was surprised that I couldn't find any simple-looking solutions in this atlas. At first I was looking for Lagrange orbits, but maybe it makes sense to exclude them if zero-mass bodies aren't allowed. I think the equilateral triangle ought to be included though.
pletnes 4 hours ago|
They’re not stable except at L4 and L5, and they all assume oke body to be massless. Arguably they are 2-body orbits for that reason. Not sure but suspect that this atlas contains non-massless bodies.
dreamcompiler 6 hours ago||
I took graduate orbital mechanics from Roger Broucke. He was one of my best professors. Not only did I learn from him what orbital elements were, but he also taught me the Runge-Kutta numerical integration method.

I didn't learn until years later that he had discovered several of the periodic solutions to the three-body problems. You'll see his name on this page.

moritzwarhier 6 hours ago||
Wow. This is really cool. Deterministic chaos is my absolute favorite in all the nerdy things there are to like in the abstract world.
edbaskerville 4 hours ago|
Deterministic chaos is cool. But this is even more special in a sense: for a problem where random initial conditions are almost always chaotic, this is a catalog of periodic orbits—these are all non-chaotic.

It would be cool to pair this with a numerical simulator that shows what happens when you perturb any of them.

EDIT: oh, it already does this, thanks other comments

boringg 5 hours ago||
This is pretty cool to be able to see all the varieties.
glitchbot 5 hours ago||
SPIROGRAPH, lowtech!
shagie 3 hours ago|
Wild Gears for the modern physical version.

There's also Spirograph Simulator (2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13256222 from... oh, a decade ago (I feel old). It still works. https://inspiral-web.nathanfriend.com

khalic 6 hours ago||
I'm going to spend so much time on this website, very good work
kmitz 5 hours ago||
Fantastic UX, so smooth even on smartphone ! Congrats
freakynit 5 hours ago||
This is beautiful. And fast!!!
ur-whale 5 hours ago||
Oh, this is so nice, but man is it hugely frustrating not to be able to rotate the thing in 3D.

Or did I not find the controls?

RugnirViking 8 hours ago|
very ai but also pretty cool. wheres the data source? could I find my own periodic solution?
porphyra 58 minutes ago|
It has a list of data sources here: https://www.threebodyorbits.com/about

This whole thing does have a strong "GPT-6 Astra look" with the big text on the left style. But it is indeed very cool.

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