3-BODY DYNAMICS - INTERMITTENT CHAOS WITH STRANGE ATTRACTOR

We have studied the structure of chaos in three-body dynamics using th e concept of intermittency, implying that violent states of a system a lternate in time with quasi-regular states producing together a non-st ationary and evolving pattern of unpredictable behaviour. Computer sim ulations are produced to demonstrate explicitly sporadic short violent bursts in quasi-regular hierarchical states of the systems. This is s een both in orbits and in the long time series generated by the system . The time series prove to be similar in shape to what is observed in various physical experiments with laboratory chaotic systems when they reveal the so-called type-m intermittency. The new effective methods of time series analysis enable us to discover a strange attractor with a fractal dimension slightly above 2. This shows that three-body dyna mics has the same intrinsic qualitative structure and quantitative mea sure of chaos as the widely known chaotic system, the Lorenz attractor .