The infamous three-body problem – the mathematical puzzle of how three objects can orbit one another according to Newton’s laws – now has hundreds of new solutions.

Last year, Shijun Liao at Shanghai Jiaotong University in China and his colleagues used a supercomputer to calculate more than a thousand new solutions , nearly doubling the known number of answers to the three-body problem. Now, they’ve added 231 more ways that three bodies bound together by gravity can orbit one another without colliding.

As before, the new solutions all hinge on periodic …