New stacked central configurations for the planar 5-body problem

A stacked central configuration in the n-body problem is one that has a proper subset of the n-bodies forming a central configuration. In this paper we study the case where three bodies with masses m1, m2, m3 (bodies 1, 2, 3) form an equilateral central configuration, and the other two with masses m4, m5 are symmetric with respect to the mediatrix of the segment joining 1 and 2, and they are above the triangle generated by {1, 2, 3}. We show the existence and non-existence of this kind of stacked central configurations for the planar 5-body problem. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.