Averaging the planar three-body problem in the neighborhood of double inner collisions (Q5947213)

The classical planar three-body problem is considered. It is known that if one of the masses is far from or large compared of the other two, each of the masses approximately describes a Keplerian ellipse whose elements slowly vary with time. At the limit where one mass is infinite or infinitely far away, the frequencies of those slow secular deformations vanish; the system then is the product of two uncopled Keplerian problems and is thus completely integrable and dynamically degenerate. In the neighborhood of this limit, if furthermore the Keplerian frequencies satisfy a finite number of non-resonance conditions, the averaged system, which is obtained by averaging the initial vector field over the Keplerian ellipces, is the first of the normal forms of the full systems. The averaged system has been extensively studied since Lagrange and Laplace but the known results did not describe the dynamics up to collisions. To solve this problem the theorem is formulated in the article: Theorem: In the planar three-body problem, for any given set of masses, there exists a transversally Cantor set of positive Liouville measure which consists of diophantine quasi-periodic punctured tori, such that along the corresponding trajectories the two inner bodies get arbitrarily close to one another an infinite number of times. A part of the proof of the theorem formulated is presented in the article. The complete proof of the theorem together with the proof of the existence of some other kinds of periodic or quasi-periodic motions in the planar three-body problem are given in J. Differ. Equations 183, No. 2, 303--341 (2002; Zbl 1057.70006).