Two particle system and reduced mass

Two body problems with central forces can always be reduced to the form of one body problems.
Consider a system made up of two particles. For an observer in any inertial frame of refrence relative motion
of these two particles can be represented by the motion of a fictitious particle.
The mass of this fictetious particle is known as the reduced mass of two particle system.
Consider a system of two particles of mass m1 and m2 respectively. Let O be the origin of any inertial frame
of refrance and r1 and r2 be the position vectors of these particles at any time t w.r.t. origin O as shown
bellow in the figure.

If no external force is acting on the system then the force acting on the system would be equal to mutual
interaction between two particles. Let the force acting on m1 due to m2 be F21 and force acting on m 2 due to
m 1 be F12 then equation of motion for particles m1 and m2 would be

but from Newton's first law of motion we have

F21 = -F12
then from equation 7 we have

putting 3 and 4 in 6 we get

is known as reduced mass of the system.