Convex but not Strictly Convex Central Configurations

Central configurations of the n-body problem have been studied for more than 200 years since the pioneer works of Euler and Lagrange. In this article we study convex central configurations which are not strictly convex. We give explicit examples of such configurations in both planar and spatial n-body problems. Particularly, in the spatial case, we consider regular polyhedra with bodies of same mass m at the vertices and bodies of same mass M at the middle points of each edge. In this setting we prove that the cube is the unique regular polyhedron such that this construction leads to a convex central configuration which is not strictly convex.