Is the three-body problem chaotic — and is the famous figure-8 choreography a stable exception?
▶ Launch the interactive simulationEvolve three equal masses under mutual gravity (symplectic velocity-Verlet) alongside a near-identical Benettin twin started δ₀=1e-8 away; track the phase-space separation, renormalise it, and average its log-growth into the largest Lyapunov exponent λ.
λ > 0 (exponential divergence of nearby trajectories ⇒ deterministic chaos) for a generic triple, vs λ ≈ 0 for the linearly-stable figure-8 choreography