Motions in the field of two rotating magnetic dipoles. II. Stability of the equilibrium points

The stability of the equilibrium points found to exist (cf. Goudaset al., 1985, referred to henceforth as Paper I) in the problem of two parallel, or antiparallel, magnetic dipoles that rotate about the centre of mass of their carrier stars, is studied by computing the characteristic roots of their variational equations. The characteristic equation, a biquadratic, solved for many combinations of and showed that all equilibrium points of this problem are unstable.