Remember my comment about the 'epicylic' output from my 2-body program with dt=0.5? Some of us sat down and discussed this puzzling result and tried to track the source of this phenomenon. We examined the numerical results from my program and noticed that indeed the radius fluctuates but probably not to the point that the particle would go in epicyclic motion. This may be an illusion that some of my colleagues suggested. Moreover, Prof. Artymowicz suggested that my for loops should stop at a certain time instead of at a specific step so that we can track what's happening at each period. So with his advice I did some visuals for certain amount of loops....
This is at around 1 loop.
Around 3 loops.
Around 7 loops.
Around 13 loops.
...and so on till you get the result that I had in my previous post. I believe in my previous post that I had the particle to go around 40 loops since I assigned n approx. 300 steps. So indeed, it does look like an illusion - the particle is not actually going in epicyclic motion.
Anthony
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