Since the days of Isaac Newton, physicists have sought to describe all the possible ways that three objects can orbit each other regularly in empty space. Solutions to the "three-body problem" could predict the dynamics of real-life planetary and stellar systems. It is also a fiendishly difficult mental puzzle: In more than 300 years, physicists had found only three solutions. Then last year, using computer simulations of three objects in motion, physicists Milovan Suvakov and Veljko Dmitrasinovic from the Institute of Physics Belgrade found 13 new solutions.
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