Dropping bodies (Q6114810)

In this article the author takes three bodies to be alone in the universe, attracted only to each other. He takes each body to be a point mass. Dropping the bodies means letting them go from rest, subject only to the rules of Newtonian mechanics and the assumption that the only forces acting on a body are the gravitational inverse-square $(1/r^2)$ pulls of the other two. Each body will then sweep out a plane curve, subject to the attractive pull of the other two moving bodies. Taken together, the three parameterized plane curves, of each body, form a solution to the Newtonian three-body problem. The terms ``dropped solution'' or ``brake orbit'' or the synonym ``free-fall solution'', for any solution of the $N$-body problem referred to the solutions in which all the bodies are instantaneously at rest at some instant. If $q=(q_1, q_2, q_3)$ represents the positions of the three bodies, the curves $q_a(t)$ are parameterized by Newtonian time $t$, then a dropped solution, or brake orbit, is one for which at the initial time $t=0$, we have $dq_a/dt=0$, $a=1,2,3$. For the masses, they are taken here equal to each other. Six figures are provided in this article, and the observer can see various symmetries within the orbits. When the bodies are dropped at time $t=0$ and if $T$ is the period, then the other brake triangle arises at time $T/2$. At time $T/4$, all three bodies lie on the symmetry line of the figure.