Lagrangian Point - History and Concepts

History and Concepts

The three collinear Lagrange points (L1, L2, L3) were discovered by Leonhard Euler a few years before Lagrange discovered the remaining two.

In 1772, the Italian-French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange was working on the famous three-body problem when he discovered an interesting quirk in the results. Originally, he had set out to discover a way to easily calculate the gravitational interaction between arbitrary numbers of bodies in a system, because Newtonian mechanics concludes that such a system results in the bodies orbiting chaotically until there is a collision, or a body is thrown out of the system so that equilibrium can be achieved.

The logic behind this conclusion is that a system with one body is trivial, as it is merely static relative to itself; a system with two bodies is the relatively simple two-body problem, with the bodies orbiting around their common center of mass. However, once more than two bodies are introduced, the mathematical calculations become very complicated. It becomes necessary to calculate the gravitational interaction between every pair of objects at every point along their trajectory.

Lagrange, however, wanted to make this simpler. He did so with a simple hypothesis: The trajectory of an object is determined by finding a path that minimizes the action over time. This is found by subtracting the potential energy from the kinetic energy. With this way of thinking, Lagrange re-formulated the classical Newtonian mechanics to give rise to Lagrangian mechanics.

Common opinion has been that Lagrange himself considered how a third body of negligible mass would orbit around two larger bodies which were already in a near-circular orbit, and found that in a frame of reference that rotates with the larger bodies, there are five specific fixed points where the third body experiences zero net force as it follows the circular orbit of its host bodies (planets). However, that is false.

Actually, Lagrange considered in the first chapter of the Essai the general three-body problem. From that, in the second chapter, he demonstrated two special constant-pattern solutions, the collinear and the equilateral, for any three masses, with conic section orbits. Thence, if one mass is made negligible, one immediately gets the five positions now known as the Lagrange Points; but Lagrange himself apparently did not note that.

In the more general case of elliptical orbits, there are no longer stationary points in the same sense: it becomes more of a Lagrangian “area”. The Lagrangian points constructed at each point in time, as in the circular case, form stationary elliptical orbits which are similar to the orbits of the massive bodies. This is due to Newton's second law (Force = Mass times Acceleration, or ), where p = mv (p the momentum, m the mass, and v the velocity) is invariant if force and position are scaled by the same factor. A body at a Lagrangian point orbits with the same period as the two massive bodies in the circular case, implying that it has the same ratio of gravitational force to radial distance as they do. This fact is independent of the circularity of the orbits, and it implies that the elliptical orbits traced by the Lagrangian points are solutions of the equation of motion of the third body.

Early in the 20th century, Trojan asteroids were discovered at the L₄ and L₅ Lagrange points of the Sun–Jupiter system.