Three equal masses follow a gravitational choreography whose paths outline the shape of a sleeping snowman — two stacked circular loops with a smaller head sitting atop a larger body. This three-body periodic solution was found through numerical exploration of symmetric orbits, and it belongs to the growing catalog of n-body choreographies with recognizable geometric forms. Each mass traces the same closed curve, offset in phase from its two companions, so the snowman figure emerges from the superposition of three identical paths. Under Newtonian gravity the masses alternately approach and recede from one another, and the gravitational forces at each close encounter must precisely cancel to keep the system repeating rather than flying apart.

The Sleeping Snow Man

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