Everywhere we look in the Universe, we see clusters of objects. Most stars are not single, like the Sun; they consist of two or more stars orbiting one another. Groups of stars are found in the open and globular star clusters, the latter containing up to a million stars. Our Milky Way galaxy is a huge swarm of a few hundred billion stars, and galaxies themselves are grouped into clusters. These cl…
As described above, there is no analytic solution for the N-body problem. However, it is possible—at least in principle—to solve the N-body problem numerically. A qualitative description of this is as follows. Suppose you have four bodies stars for instance—all moving around one another under the influence of each other's gravity. At a given time, we can calculate the g…
The N-body problem is one ideally suited to a computer—a machine that can repeat a prescribed string of commands with blazing speed. So the task now seems simple: plug Newton's law of gravitation into a gigahertz computer, specify the initial positions and velocities of the objects under study, hit return, and sit back with a cool drink to watch the fun. Of course, nothing is ever th…
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