Like toy cars chasing each other on a looped racetrack, three stars can theoretically trace out a figure-eight orbit in space. This newly discovered, mathematically surprising motion arises from the force of gravity acting on three bodies of equal mass whose movements are timed so that each body in turn passes between the other two.
Mathematicians Richard Montgomery of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Alain Chenciner of the Bureau des Longitudes in Paris describe their new solution of the equations of motion for three gravitationally interacting bodies in a report available at http://count.ucsc.edu/~rmont/Nbdy.html.