Calculating Stable Circular Orbits for Binary Stars
Binary stars are cool. But if you have two stars interacting with a gravitational interaction, there are technically 6 coordinates you need to deal with (3 vector components for each star). It’s possible to reduce this to an equivalent 1 dimensional problem, but I’m not going to go over that today. Instead, I’m going to show you two things: how to calculate the initial conditions for stable orbits and…
