What is a Three Body Problem?
In: Physics
If you have only two objects in space, they will move around each other due to gravity in well defined mathematical shapes like circles, ellipses, parabolas or hyperbolas. Relatively simple formulas can describe exactly where they will be at any point in the future and the amount of work required for the calculation doesn’t increase with time.
Adding a third object breaks all the above except for a small number of special cases. The only way the calculate the positions is to simulate the object’s motion in small steps. The amount of work required increases the further you go into the future and the results are only approximations with errors that increase over time.
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