Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The restricted three body problem models the motion of a body of zero mass under the influence of the Newtonian gravitational force caused by two other bodies, the primaries, which describe Keplerian orbits. In 1922, Chazy conjectured that this model had oscillatory motions, that is, orbits which leave every bounded region but which return infinitely often to some fixed bounded region. Its existence was not proven until 1960 by Sitnikov in a extremely symmetric and carefully chosen configuration. In 1973, Moser related oscillatory motions to the existence of chaotic orbits given by a horseshoe and thus associated to certain transversal homoclinic points. Since then, there has been many atempts to generalize their result to more general settings in the restricted three body problem.In 1980, J. Llibre and C. Sim\'o, using Moser ideas, proved the existence of oscillatory motions for the restricted planar circular three body problem provided that the ratio between the masses of the two primaries was arbitrarily small. In this talk I will explain how to generalize their result to any value of the mass ratio. I will also explain how to generalize the result to the restricted planar elliptic three body problem. This is based on joint works with P. Martin, T. M. Seara. and L. Sabbagh.