choreographies

At the turn of the millennium, Carles Simó discovered several hundred planar three-body gravitational choreographies, and here they are in your browser:

Gravitational choreographies are periodic solutions of gravitational systems in which all bodies traverse the same orbit at equally spaced intervals. A system that starts off entirely in a plane, with no velocity components normal to the plane, will remain in the plane. For the choreographies presented here, the first third of the orbit is red, the second blue and the third green.