Binary fission via lnviscid Trajectories

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Abstract
We sketch an evolutionary picture which, unlike the classical picture, appears favorable to the hypothesis that close binary stars originate in the fission of a single slowly contracting protostar. The main differences from the classical picture are (1) evolution proceeds along certain families of Riemann ellipsoids, rather than along the Jacobi family and (2) the critical ellipsoid on the evolutionary trajectory suffers a deformation given by an ellipsoidal harmonic of order four, rather than of order three.

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