The planetary orbit in Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’ is random and chaotic, but could it exist?

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The planetary orbit in Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’ is random and chaotic, but could it exist?

The three-body problem is a familiar puzzle in astrophysics. (Shutterstock)Note: The following article contains spoilers about the Netflix series “3 Body Problem.” I first encountered the three-body problem 60 years ago, in a short story called “Placet is a Crazy Place” by American science fiction writer Frederic Brown. In Brown’s story, Placet is a planet in a figure-of-eight orbit around two stars, one of which is composed of ordinary matter,…