Critical homoclinics in a restricted four-body problem: numerical continuation and center manifold computations (Q2033673)

In this paper, the authors study the robustness of certain basic homoclinic motions in an equilateral restricted four-body problem, where the three gravitating bodies are arranged in the equilateral triangle configuration of Lagrange. The circular restricted four-body problem (CRFBP) studies the dynamics of a fourth massless particle in a co-rotating reference frame. The problem can be viewed as a two-parameter family of conservative autonomous vector fields. The main tools are numerical continuation techniques for homoclinic and periodic orbits, as well as, formal series methods for computing normal forms and center stable/unstable manifold parameterizations. A number of special cases have been studied numerically by the authors and they formulate several conjectures about the global bifurcations of the homoclinic families.