Convexity and symmetry of central configurations in the five-body problem: Lagrange plus two (Q1981901)

The authors in this paper, study the convexity and symmetry of central configurations in the five-body problem where three of the masses are located at the vertices of an equilateral triangle which called ``Lagrange plus two central configurations''. The study can be categorized inside the stacked central configuration class (when a proper subset is also a central configuration), similar to Dziobek's condition for four bodies. It is proved, first, here that the two bodies out of the vertices of the triangle cannot be placed on certain lines. It is also giving, here, a geometrical characterization of such configurations, and it is describing the admissible regions where the two remaining bodies can be placed. Furthermore, it is proving that any Lagrange plus two central configuration is concave. In particular, there are no \((5,2)\)-stacked central configurations strictly convex, with \(n=5\) the total number of bodies and \(k=2\) where \(k=1,\ldots, n-3\), means the bodies that can be removed maintaining the configuration central. The authors also, show numerically the existence of the first non-symmetric Lagrange plus two central configurations of the five body problem.