Relative equilibria of the four-body problem

Abstract

AbstractBy employing a regularizing transformation, the problem of bifurcation of relative equilibria in the Newtonian 4-body problem is reduced to a study of an algebraic correspondence between real algebraic varieties. The finiteness theorems of algebraic geometry are used to find an upper bound for the number of affine equivalence classes of relative equilibria which holds for all masses in the complement of a proper, algebraic subset of the space of all masses.