Celestia Forums

I suspect that the exact locations of stable orbits requires complex simulation and stuff, but are there some "quick-and-dirty" formulae for the outermost stable orbit around one component of a binary star system and the innermost stable orbit around both, given the masses of the two components, separation, eccentricity and stuff like that?

Thanks,

Chaos.

The original reference for this stuff is Szebehely's Stability of Planetary Orbits in Binary Systems.
You might also want to look at Holman and Wiegert's Long-term Stability of Planets in Binary Systems. Of course, the existence of stable orbits doesn't imply that planets can actually form in those positions: so Whitmire et al's Habitable Planet Formation in Binary Systems is of interest.

Grant

I can certainly vouch for those papers, I've used them to figure out stable orbits myself