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raverbashingtoday at 11:55 AM3 repliesview on HN

Yes. Because 3 points are coplanar, so every "3D problem" with 3 objects can be turned into a 2D problem on the correspondent plane

(of course in real life your plane would keep changing, and probably some other complicated math I can't think right now)


Replies

petsfedtoday at 4:26 PM

Put another way, while their positions are one set of 3 points, their momenta are another set of 3 points, and there is no requirement that 6 points will always lay on the same plane.

I wonder what phantom forces would appear when the reference frame changes in some complicated fashion. We get centrifugal "force" when we reconstruct F=dP/dt in a rotating reference frame, what would the 3-body "force" look like?

raincoletoday at 12:23 PM

Why would the plane keep changing? If there are only these three objects, won't the vectors of their gravitational pull to each other all be on this plane too?

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nautilus12today at 3:36 PM

Oh makes perfect sense, do you have thoughts about real life examples? I did some research using AI and it said there were examples of restricted 3 body problems like the trojan asteroids, but no examples in real life similar to what is in this web app