The unit ball is an attractor of the intersection body operator

The intersection body of a ball is again a ball. So, the unit ball Bd⊂Rd is a fixed point of the intersection body operator acting on the space of all star-shaped origin symmetric bodies endowed with the Banach–Mazur distance. E. Lutwak asked if there is any other star-shaped body that satisfies this property. We show that this fixed point is a local attractor, i.e., that the iterations of the intersection body operator applied to any star-shaped origin symmetric body sufficiently close to Bd in Banach–Mazur distance converge to Bd in Banach–Mazur distance. In particular, it follows that the intersection body operator has no other fixed or periodic points in a small neighborhood of Bd. We will also discuss a harmonic analysis version of this question, which studies the Radon transforms of powers of a given function.