1.6 Assignment: Three-Body Problem

Have you read The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu? If not you should do so in the holidays!

For this assignment, you will think of how to incoporate a third body and let all three of them interact gravitationally.

You will then test-run a 3-body system of your choice in trinket.io. Once you are satisfied with your code, obtain a sharable link (see below for administrative details).

If you can’t get enough of seeing moving balls, there are a couple of things you can do, just for fun, or score some points (perhaps, maybe, no guarantee!). Note that everything in the following paragraph is optional.

There are many beautiful stable solutions for the 3-body problem. You may like to see if you can replicate one of those. An obvious extension is to do a 4-body problem. Or 5 or 6 or 7?? Do a leapfrog/Verlet numerical scheme. The numerical solution given by the author in the blog is done with the Euler scheme, which does not conserve energy. Thus even for a two body problem, the solution do not give a truly stable orbit.

1.6.1 Administrative details

This assignment is to be done individually, and holds 8% weightage of the total assessment for The Universe.

No need for a formal report. Just copy and paste the url link to your simulation, copy and paste a screen shot of your favourite snapshot of the simulation, and write a paragraph to describe your 3-body system.