Rare system of five stars discovered

Re:Rare system of five stars discovered by leni536 on Thursday July 09, 2015 @05:56AM (#9857001)

Orbiting around the center of gravity only can be applied for two body systems. For many body systems it can be applied too as a careful approximation (like in the article). The movement of a small planet in the middle couldn't be described by this however, since it's an approximate three body system now (the two pairs and the planet)-

There could be stable point's in the middle, I don't know about that. Most certainly it can't be described by this approximation.

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Re:Rare system of five stars discovered by lagadu on Thursday July 09, 2015 @06:37AM (#9857113)

Looking into it, couldn't a planet orbit one of the two stable Lagrange points between the two groups, L4 and L5? That wouldn't be "inside" the orbit though :(

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Re:Rare system of five stars discovered by leni536 on Thursday July 09, 2015 @08:18AM (#9857398)

Yeah, I would think that the quasi stable orbits would be L4, L5 or orbiting around any of the pairs. If you have a symmetric situation isn't the middle point exactly L1? That would be unstable.

Edit: From Wikipedia:

>The triangular points (L4 and L5) are stable equilibria, provided that the ratio of M1/M2 is greater than 24.96.

So with a symmetric situation, where M1/M2=1 they wouldn't be stable either.

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