Cascade in space

photo by ken

On a whim, I picked up this book I didn't read even half way through. The Mathematics of Juggling, I found, is actually very readable and interesting book. In the former half of the book, the author goes on in depth about siteswap theorems and proofs, which is kind of boring. But, the latter half is a wealth of surprising and interesting topics.

Here's a picture of some relatively new solutions to so-called n-body problem. Celestial objects like suns obey a simple newtonic gravitational rule, however, solving such a system has long been known quite a tough problem to solve. Only two solutions were known until recently. Both solutions were found in 18th century.

In 1993, some guy found that the 3 body cascade is semi-stable. After his founding, somebody did a numerical analysis and predicted that there might be a combination of 3 suns in a galaxy or in the universe, where the 3 objects are doing the cascade! Amazing...