Timeline for The two-body problem - planets orbiting each other

6 events

when toggle format	what		by	license	comment
Jan 5, 2015 at 22:57	comment	added	user27118		It's ambiguous. As stated, the question sounds like we are choosing a non-inertial frame that follows on of the physical bodies. John Rennie is correct, that's a nutty way to attack this problem. I suspect the author really meant something like the reduced mass approach David Hammen describes, where we choose the CM (not an actual body) reference frame.
Jan 5, 2015 at 17:28	comment	added	David Hammen		Absolutely. That the trajectory of one object with respect to another is a conic section is standard stuff in any classical mechanics text, e.g., Marion, Taylor, Goldstein, you name it. Showing that the trajectories of each of the objects about the barycenter are also conic sections follows.
Jan 5, 2015 at 16:58	comment	added	John Rennie		@DavidHammen: for two objects of similar masses?
Jan 5, 2015 at 16:50	vote	accept	E Be
Jan 5, 2015 at 16:43	comment	added	David Hammen		Re It's hard to think of any reason why a sane physicist would do this. This is exactly what sane physicists do. The reduced mass reduces the two body problem to a one body problem, in which one of the bodies is frozen at the origin and the other (the reduced mass) is orbiting that frozen body. Now you only have one equation of motion to analyze. This makes the problem much easier to solve.
Jan 5, 2015 at 15:56	history	answered	John Rennie	CC BY-SA 3.0