Jacobi’s Three-Body System Moves like a Free Particle

Abstract

The problem of three bodies which attract each other with forces proportional to the cube of the inverse of their distance and move on a line was reduced to one quadrature by Jacobi [23]. Here we show that the equations of motions admit a five-dimensional Lie symmetry algebra and can be reduced to a single second-order linear equation, i.e. the equation of motion of a single free particle on the line.