Category Archives: Theoretical celestial mechanics

Theoretical celestial mechanics

Ellipsoids in the Universe

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Hi there! The ellipsoid is a basic shape in planetary sciences. In other words, many planetary bodies are kind of ellipsoids. But what does that mean? And what does that infer? Does it tell us something on the origin of the body, on its structure, on its size? Well, maybe…
This is the opportunity for me to introduce Classification of ellipsoids by shape and surface gravity, by Anthony Dobrovolskis. With very accurate calculations, the author classifies these bodies, following their shape, the reason why they are ellipsoids, and the possible behavior of their surface. This study has recently been published in Icarus.

Outline

A world of ellipsoids
Rotation and tides shape an ellipsoid
Primordial ellipsoids
3 classes of asteroids
4 classes of moonlets
The study and its author

A world of ellipsoids

First, what is an ellipsoid? Well, this is a volume, which boundary is characterized by three lengths. Each of these lengths gives the maximal distance between two points of the surface of the ellipsoid in a given direction. This may seem fairly abstract, doesn’t it?

Well, you know what a ball is. It is a kind of 3-dimensional circle. The ball has a center, with which every point of the surface has the same distance. This distance is the radius, and twice the radius is the diameter, which is also the maximal distance between two points of the surface of the ball.

Now, imagine a rugby ball, or an US football ball. You see what I mean? Yes, you’ve got something closer to an ellipsoid.

And why speaking of an ellipsoid? Well, as usual in science, this is an approximate model, which permits to render things pretty well. When you look at a celestial body in the sky, you see a dot. Degree 0 approximation. Now, if you look closer, you see a ball. Degree 1 approximation. And if you want to be more accurate, then you make a degree 2 approximation, i.e. an ellipsoid.

I hope this makes now more sense to you. And you could wonder: why stop there? why not stopping at degree 3, degree 4, or even more? I see at least two answers to this question

  1. Sometimes, we cannot do better. Well, only sometimes. For instance, we can go further than the order 100 for the Earth or the Moon. We also know the shape of Mars with a very good accuracy. We also dispose of accurate shape models of asteroids.
  2. In many cases, there is a physical justification for a degree 2 approximation of the shape. I mean, physics shape many objects, especially when they are large enough (some 200 km) to be in hydrostatic equilibrium. Let us see that now.

Rotation and tides shape an ellipsoid

Imagine a ball of fluid. This is like a ball. Like a star, like the Sun. Now, if this bowl has a significant rotation about one axis (which is anyway the case for stars), then it flattens at its poles. This is particularly obvious for the gas giants, i.e. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, but actually for any planet. Even our Earth. The mean equatorial radius of the Earth is 6,378.1 km, while its polar radius is 6,356.8 km.

And now, imagine a planetary satellite, like our Moon, but what I will tell you also holds for most of the satellites of the gas giants (well-known example: Saturn’s Titan). The satellites rotate synchronously, i.e. their orbital period is exactly the same as their spin period. As a consequence, they always show the same face to their parent body. In doing so, the same point of the surface is always closer to the parent planet, and is affected by a stronger gravitational perturbation, which tends to elongate the satellite. You have now a triaxiality!

What we call hydrostatic equilibrium is a balance between the self gravity of the body and the torques affecting its shape, i.e. rotation and tides, when applicable. Tides can be neglected for most of the planets. Mercury is a notable exception among them, since it is the closest to the Sun, and it is locked in a spin-orbit resonance. Contrary to the planetary satellites, this is not the 1:1 synchronous resonance, but the 3:2 one. In other words, the orbital period of Mercury is 88 days, while its rotational one is two thirds of it, i.e. some 58 days. And it can be shown, with equations of course, that this state generates a triaxiality, which is anyway smaller than the one raised by the synchronicity.

So, for large bodies, physics tell us that they should be quite ellipsoidal. Of course, there is some discrepancy to this rule, this is why you may have mountains, and more generally heterogeneity
in the structure. But, this does not work that bad. And what about smaller bodies?

Primordial ellipsoids

Well, for smaller bodies, the hydrostatic equilibrium does not help you. So, you may have different kinds of shape, mostly irregular (I like calling them potatoidal). Usually, their shape is primordial, i.e. no process affected it since the formation of the body (from accretion or collision… possibly both).

The ellipsoidal approximation can anyway give interesting results, in the sense that it can even model a cigar-like body. You just have to consider that two axes have a very small ratio. A well-known example is the interstellar interloper 1I/’Oumuamua, which visited our Solar System in October 2017, on an eccentric orbit, suggesting it was formed around another star. That body was not directly imaged, but observed variations of its albedo are consistent with a cigar-like shape.

3 classes of asteroids

After very rigorous analytical calculations, the author classifies free rotators (i.e., not affected by tides) into three classes, and classifies 99 asteroids, which shapes are known.

These classes are delimited following the shape index ζ=(1-c/b)/(b/a), where a > b > c are the three radii of the asteroid.

  • high-brow: these bodies are the closest to a ball. ζ<0.44
  • middle-brow
  • low-brow: these bodies have extreme shapes, like discuses, or javelins. ζ > 1

4 classes of moonlets

Moonlets are small planetary satellites, like Mars’ Phobos, or Saturn’s Methone. The author identifies four classes, which are
the three previous ones, and the new class of the ultra-low-brow moonlets.

Phobos seen by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. © NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Phobos seen by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. © NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

 

Saturn's Methone seen by Cassini. © NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute
Saturn’s Methone seen by Cassini. © NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute

You can wonder: why doing that? Well, it could tell us something on the formation of our Solar System, in permitting statistics on the existing bodies. If we encounter another system (and we now know that there are many extrasolar systems), and if we have one day enough data to perform those statistics, any discrepancy, or absence of discrepancy, with the statistics of the Solar System will tell us something on our differences.

The study and its author

And that’s it for today! Please do not forget to comment. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed, and follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Theoretical celestial mechanics

New chaos indicators

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Hi there! Today it is a little bit different. I will not tell you about something that has been observed but rather of a more general concept, which is the chaos in the Solar System. This is the opportunity to present you Second-order chaos indicators MEGNO2 and OMEGNO2: Theory, by Vladimir A. Shefer. This study has been originally published in Russian, but you can find an English translation in the Russian Physics Journal.

Outline

Sensitivity to the initial conditions
Stability
Diffusion of the Fundamental Frequencies
The KAM and the Nekhoroshev theorems
Chaos in the Solar System
The maximal Lyapunov exponent
To go faster: FLI and MEGNO
This study presents MEGNO2
The study and its author

To present you this theoretical study, I need to define some useful notions related to chaos. First is the sensitivity to the initial conditions.

Sensitivity to the initial conditions

Imagine you are a planetary body. I put you somewhere in the Solar System. This somewhere is your initial condition, actually composed of 6 elements: 3 for the position, and 3 for the velocity. So, I put you there, and you evolve, under the gravitational interaction of the other guys, basically the Sun and the planets of the Solar System. You then have a trajectory, which should be an orbit around the Sun, with some disturbances of the planets. What would have happened if your initial condition would have been slightly different? Well, you expect your trajectory to have been slightly different, i.e. pretty close.

Does it always happen this way? Actually, not always. Sometimes yes, but sometimes… imagine you have a close encounter with a planet (hopefully not the Earth). During the encounter, you are very sensitive to the gravitational perturbation of that planet. And if you arrive a little closer, or a little further, then that may change your trajectory a lot, since the perturbation depends on the distance to the planet. In such a case, you are very sensitive to the initial conditions.

What does that mean? It actually means that if you are not accurate enough on the initial condition, then your predicted trajectory will lack of accuracy. And beyond a certain point, predicting will just be pointless. This point can be somehow quantified with the Lyapunov time, see a little later.

An example of body likely to have close encounters with the Earth is the asteroid (99942) Apophis, which was discovered in 2004, and has sometimes close encounters with the Earth. There was one in 2013, there will be another one in 2029, and then in 2036. But risks of impact are ruled out, don’t worry. 🙂

Let us talk now about the problem of stability.

Stability

A stable orbit is an orbit which stays around the central body. A famous and recent example of unstable orbit is 1I/’Oumuamua, you know, our interstellar visitor. It comes from another planetary system, and passes by, on a hyperbolic orbit. No chaos in that case.

But sometimes, an initially stable orbit may become unstable because of an accumulation of gravitational interactions, which raise its eccentricity, which then exceeds 1. And this is where you may connect instability with sensitivity to initial conditions, and chaos. But this is not the same. And you can even be stable while chaotic.

Now, let us define a related (but different) notion, which is the diffusion of the fundamental frequencies.

Diffusion of the Fundamental Frequencies

Imagine you are on a stable, classical orbit, i.e. an ellipse. The Sun lies at one of its foci, and you have an orbital frequency, a precessional frequency of your pericenter, and a frequency related to the motion of your ascending node. All of these points have a motion around the Sun, with constant velocities. So, the orbit can be described with 3 fundamental frequencies. If your orbit is perturbed by other bodies, which have their own fundamental frequencies, then you will find them as additional frequencies in your trajectory. Very well. If the trajectories remain constant, then it can be topologically said that your trajectories lies on tori.

Things become more complicated when you have a drift of these fundamental frequencies. It is very often related to chaos, and sometimes considered as an indicator of it. In such a case, the tori are said to be destroyed. And we have theorems, which address the survival of these tori.

The KAM and the Nekhoroshev theorems

The most two famous of them are the KAM and the Nekhoroshev theorems.

KAM stands for Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser, which were 3 famous mathematicians, specialists of dynamical systems. These problems are indeed not specific to astronomy or planetology, but to any physical system, in which we neglect the dissipation.

The KAM theorem says that, for a slightly perturbed integrable system (allow me not to develop this point… just keep in mind that the 2-body problem is integrable), some tori survive, which means that you can have regular (non chaotic) orbits anyway. But some of them may be not. This theorem needs several assumptions, which may be difficult to fulfill when you have too many bodies.

The Nekhoroshev theory addresses the effective stability of destroyed tori. If the perturbation is small enough, then the trajectories, even not exactly on tori, will remain close enough to them over an exponentially long time, i.e. longer than the age of the Solar System. So, you may be chaotic, unstable… but remain anyway where you are.

Chaos is related to all of these notions, actually there are several definitions of chaos in the literature. Consider it as a mixture of all the elements I gave you. In particular the sensitivity to the initial conditions.

Chaos in the Solar System

Chaos has been observed in the Solar System. The first observation is the tumbling rotation of the satellite of Saturn Hyperion (see featured image). So, not an orbital case. Chaos has also been characterized in the motion of asteroids, for instance the Main-Belt asteroid (522) Helga has been proven to be in stable chaos in 1992 (see here). It is in fact swinging between two mean-motion resonances with Jupiter (Chirikov criterion), which confine its motion, but make it difficult to predict anyway. The associated Lyapunov time is 6.9 kyr.

There are also chaotic features in the rings of Saturn, which are due to the accumulation of resonances with satellites so close to the planet. These effects are even raised by the non-linear self-dynamics of the rings, in which the particles interact and collide. And the inner planets of the Solar System are chaotic over some 10s of Myr, this has been proven by long-term numerical integrations of their orbits.

To quantify this chaos, you need the Lyapunov time.

The maximal Lyapunov exponent

The Lyapunov time is the invert of the Lyapunov exponent. To estimate the Lyapunov exponent, you numerically integrate the trajectory, and its tangent vector. When the orbit is chaotic, the norm of this vector will grow exponentially, and the Lyapunov exponent is the asymptotic limit of the divergence rate of this exponential growth. It is strictly positive in case of chaos. Easy, isn’t it?

Not that easy, actually. The exponential growth makes that this norm might be too large and generate numerical errors, but this can be fixed in regularly, i.e. at equally spaced time intervals, renormalizing the tangent vector. Another problem is in the asymptotic limit: you may have to integrate over a verrrrrry long time to reach it. To bypass this problem of convergence, other indicators have been invented.

To go faster: FLI and MEGNO

FLI stands for Fast Lyapunov Indicators. There are several variants, the most basic one consists in stopping the integration at a given time. So, you give up the asymptotic limit, and you give up the Lyapunov time, but you can efficiently distinguish the regular orbits from the chaotic ones. This is a good point.

Another chaos detector is the MEGNO, for Mean Exponential Growth of Nearby Orbits. This consists to integrate the norm of the time derivative of the tangent vector divided by the norm of the tangent vector. The result tends to a straight line, which slope is half the maximal Lyapunov exponent. And this tool converges very fast. The author of the study I present you wishes to improve that tool.

This study presents MEGNO2

And for that, he presents us MEGNO2. This works like MEGNO, but with an osculating vector instead of a tangent one. Tangent means that this vector fits to a line tangent to the trajectory, while osculating means that it fits to its curvature as well, i.e. second order derivative. In other words, it is more accurate.

From this, the author shows that, like MEGNO, MEGNO2 tends to a straight line, but with a larger slope. As a consequence, he argues that it permits a more efficient detection of the chaotic orbits with respect to the regular ones. However, he does not address the link between this new slope and the Lyapunov time.

Something that my writing does not render, is that this paper is full of equations. Fair enough, for what I could call mathematical planetology.

The study and its author

As it often happens for purely theoretical studies, this one has only one author.

And that’s it for today! Please do not forget to comment. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed, and follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Theoretical celestial mechanics

Modeling the shape of a planetary body

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Hi there! Do you know the shape of the Moon? You say yes of course! But up to which accuracy? The surface of the Moon has many irregularities, which prompted Christian Hirt and Michael Kuhn to study the limits of the mathematics, in modeling the shape of the Moon. Their study, entitled Convergence and divergence in spherical harmonic series of the gravitational field generated by high-resolution planetary topography — A case study for the Moon, has recently been accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

Outline

The shape of planetary bodies
The Brillouin sphere
Why modeling it?
Spherical harmonics expansion
Methodology
Results
To know more…

The shape of planetary bodies

If you look at a planetary body from far away (look at a star, look at Jupiter,…), you just see a point mass. If you get closer, you would see a sphere, if the body is not too small. Small bodies, let us say smaller than 100 km, can have any shape (may I call them potatoids?) If they are larger, the material almost arranges as a sphere, which gives the same gravity field as the point mass, provided you are out of the body. But if you look closer, you would see some polar flattening, due to the rotation of the body. And for planetary satellites, you also have an equatorial ellipticity, the longest axis pointing to the parent planet. Well, in that case, you have a triaxial ellipsoid. You can say that the sphere is a degree 0 approximation of the shape, and that the triaxial ellipsoid is a degree 2 approximation… but still an approximation.

A planetary body has some relief, mountains, basins… there are explanations for that, you can have, or have had, tectonic activity, basins may have been created by impacts, you can have mass anomalies in the interior, etc. This means that the planetary body you consider (in our example, the Moon), is not exactly a triaxial ellipsoid. Being more accurate than that becomes complicated. A way to do it is with successive approximations, in the same way I presented you: first a sphere, then a triaxial ellipsoid, then something else… but when do you stop? And can you stop, i.e. does your approximation converge? This study addresses this problem.

The Brillouin sphere

This problem is pretty easy when you are far enough from the body. You just see it as a sphere, or an ellipsoid, since you do not have enough resolution to consider the irregularities in the topography… by the way, I am tempted to make a confusion between topography and gravity. The gravity field is the way the mass of your body will affect the trajectory of the body with which it interacts, i.e. the Earth, Lunar spacecrafts… If you are close enough, you will be sensitive to the mass distribution in the body, which is of course linked to the topography. So, the two notions are correlated, but not fully, since the gravity is more sensitive to the interior.

But let us go back to this problem of distance. If you are far enough, no problem. The Moon is either a sphere, or a triaxial ellipsoid. If you get closer, you should be more accurate. And if you are too close, then you cannot be accurate enough.

This limit is given by the radius of the Brillouin sphere. Named after the French-born American physicist Léon Brillouin, this is the circumscribing sphere of the body. If your planetary body is spherical, then it exactly fills its Brillouin sphere, and this problem is trivial… If you are a potatoidal asteroid, then your volume will be only a fraction of this sphere, and you can imagine having a spacecraft inside this sphere.

The asteroid Itokawa in its Brillouin-sphere. Credit: JAXA.
The asteroid Itokawa in its Brillouin-sphere. Credit: JAXA.

The Moon is actually pretty close to a sphere, of radius 1737.4±1 km. But many mass anomalies have been detected, which makes its gravity field not that close to the one of the sphere, and you can be inside the equivalent Brillouin sphere (if we translate gravity into topography), in flying over the surface at low altitude.

Why modeling it?

Why trying to be that accurate on the gravity field / topography of a planetary object? I see at least two good reasons, please pick the ones you prefer:

  • to be able to detect the time variations of the topography and / or the gravity field. This would give you the tidal response (see here) of the body, or the evolution of its polar caps,
  • because it’s fun,
  • to be able to control the motion of low-altitude spacecrafts. This is particularly relevant for asteroids, which are somehow potatoidal (am I coining this word?)

You can object that the Moon may be not the best body to test the gravity inside the Brillouin sphere. Actually we have an invaluable amount of data on the Moon, thanks to the various missions, the Lunar Laser Ranging, which accurately measures the Earth-Moon distance… Difficult to be more accurate than on the Moon…

The goal of the paper is actually not to find something new on the Moon, but to test different models of topography and gravity fields, before using them on other bodies.

Spherical harmonics expansion

Usually the gravity field (and the topography) is described as a spherical harmonics expansion, i.e. you model your body as a sum of waves with increasing frequencies, over two angles, which are the latitude and the longitude. This is why the order 0 is the exact sphere, the order 2 is the triaxial ellipsoid… and in raising the order, you introduce more and more peaks and depressions in your shape… In summing them, you should have the gravity field of your body… if your series converge. It is usually assume that you converge outside the Brillouin sphere… It is not that clear inside.

To test the convergence, you need to measure a distance between your series and something else, that you judge relevant. It could be an alternative gravitational model, or just the next approximation of the series. And to measure the distance, a common unit is the gal, which is an acceleration of 1 cm/s2 (you agree that gravity gives acceleration?). In this paper, the authors checked differences at the level of the μgal, i.e. 1 gal divided by 1 million.

Methodology

In this study, the authors used data from two sources:

  • high-resolution shape maps from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA),
  • gravity data from the mission GRAIL (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory),

and they modeled 4 gravity fields:

  1. Topography of the surface,
  2. Positive topographic heights, i.e. for basins the mean radius was considered, while the exact topography was considered for mountains,
  3. “Brillouin-sphere”, at a mean altitude of 11 km,
  4. “GRAIL-sphere”, at a mean altitude of 23 km.

In each of these cases, the authors used series of spherical harmonics of orders between 90 (required spatial resolution: 60.6 km) and 2,160 (resolution: 2.5 km). In each case, the solution with spherical harmonics was compared with a direct integration of the potential of the body, for which the topography is discretized through an ensemble of regularly-shaped elements.

Results

And here are the results:

Not surprisingly, everything converges in the last two cases, i.e. altitudes of 11 and 23 km. However, closer to the surface the expansion in spherical harmonics fails from orders 720 (case 1) and 1,080 (case 2), respectively. This means that adding higher-order harmonics does not stabilize the global solution, which can be called divergence. The authors see from their calculations that this can be predicted from the evolution of the amplitude of the terms of the expansion, with respect to their orders. To be specific, their conclusion is summarized as follows:

A minimum in the degree variances of an external potential model foreshadows divergence of the spherical harmonic series expansions at points inside the Brillouin-sphere.

 

My feeling is that this study should be seen as a laboratory test of a mathematical method, i.e. testing the convergence of the spherical harmonics expansion, not on a piece of paper, but in modeling a real body, with real data. I wonder how the consideration of time variations of the potential would affect these calculations.

To know more…

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Theoretical celestial mechanics

Mathematics of the spin-orbit resonance

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Hi there! Today things are a little bit different. The paper I present you is not published in a journal of astronomy, nor of planetary sciences, but of mathematics. It is entitled Hamiltonian formulation of the spin-orbit model with time-varying non-conservative forces, by Ioannis Gkolias, Christos Efthymiopoulos, Giuseppe Pucacco and Alessandra Celletti, and it has been recently published in Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation. It deals with a mathematical way to express and solve the spin-orbit problem. This mathematical way is the Hamiltonian formulation.

The spin-orbit problem

It is something I already discussed on this blog, but never mind. Imagine you have a triaxial body orbiting a largest one… e.g. the Moon orbiting the Earth… or a satellite orbiting a giant planet. Usually the satellite always show the same face to the planet, which is a consequence of a synchronous rotation, which you can call 1:1 spin-orbit resonance. It can be shown that this synchronous resonance is a dynamical equilibrium, i.e. the fact that the angular momentum of the satellite is almost orthogonal to its orbit, and the long axis always points to the parent planet, is a stable position. This is makes the synchronous rotation ubiquitous in the Solar System. Initially the satellite had some rotation, which could have had any spin and orientation. And then, the dissipations of energy, mostly tides raised by the planet, have damped the rotation until reaching the synchronous rotation. At this point, the energy given by the gravitational torque of the planet is large enough to compensate the tides. Since it is a stable equilibrium, then the system stays there, i.e. the rotation remains synchronous.

Hamiltonian formulation

Let us start from conservative mechanics, i.e. in the absence of dissipation. Neglecting the dissipation might be a priori surprising, but this approximation is used since centuries. In planetary systems, dissipation can be easily seen from geysers, volcanoes…, but its effects on the orbital and rotational dynamics are very small, and hence difficult to measure. Lunar Laser Ranging have shown us that the Earth-Moon distance is increasing by some 3.9 cm / yr, as a consequence of the dissipation. We have measurements of such an effect in the system of Jupiter since 2009, and in the system of Saturn since 2011. Moreover, if we assume that the equilibrium has been reached, then we can consider that the loss of energy is compensated by the energy exchanges between the parent planet and the satellite. This is why neglecting the dissipation is sometimes allowed… even if the paper I present you does not neglect it.

So, in conservative mechanics, the total energy of the system is conserved. The total energy of the system is the sum of the kinetic and potential energies of all of the bodies involved. This total energy depends on the variables of the system, i.e. the orbital and rotational variables. It can be shown that convenient sets of variables exist, i.e. canonical variables, which time derivatives are the partial derivatives of the total energy, written with this set of variables, which respect to their conjugate variables. In that case, the formulation of the total energy is called Hamiltonian of the system, and the ensuing equations are the Hamilton equations.

The Hamiltonian formulation is very convenient from a mathematical point of view. Its properties make the dynamics of the system easier to interpret. For instance, in manipulating the Hamiltonian, you can determine its equilibrium, their stability, and the small oscillations (librations) around it. This mathematical structure can also be used to construct dedicated numerical integrators, called symplectic integrators, which solve the equations numerically. Symplectic integrators are reputed for their numerical stability.

Viscoelasticity and tides

Let us talk now on the dissipation. The main source of dissipation is the tides raised by the parent planet. Since its gravitational torque felt by the satellite is not homogeneous over its volume, as distance-dependent, then the satellite experiences stress and strains which alter its shape and induces energy loss. So, the tides have two consequences: loss of energy and variation of the shape. The paper proposes a way to consider these effects in a Hamiltonian formalism.

This paper

As the authors honestly admit, it is somehow inaccurate to speak of Hamiltonian formulation when you have dissipation. Their paper deals with the dissipative spin-orbit problem, so their “Hamiltonian” function is not an Hamiltonian strictly speaking, but the ensuing equations have a symplectic structure.

They assume that the dissipation is contained in a function F, which depends on the time t, and discuss the resolution of the problem with respect to the form of F: either a constant dissipation, or a quasi-periodic one, or the sum of a constant and a quasi-periodic one.

Of course, this paper is very technical, and I do not want to go too deep into the details. I would like to mention their treatment of the quasi-periodic case. Quasi-periodic means that the function F, i.e. the dissipation, can be written under a sum of sines and cosines, i.e. oscillations, of different frequencies. This is physically realistic, in the sense that the material constituting the satellite has a different response with respect to the excitation frequency, and the time evolution of the distance planet-satellite and a pretty wide spectrum itself.
In that case, the dissipation function F depends on the time, which is a problem. But it is classically by-passed in assuming the time to be a new variable of the problem, and in adding to the Hamiltonian a dummy conjugate variable. This is a way to transform a non-autonomous (time-dependent) Hamiltonian into an autonomous one, with an additional degree of freedom.
Once this is done, the resolution of the problem is made with a perturbative approach. It is assumed, which is physically realistic, that the amplitudes of the oscillations which constitute the F function are of different orders of magnitudes. This allows to classify them from the most important to the less important ones, with the help of a virtual book-keeping parameter λ. This is a small parameter, and the amplitude of the oscillations will be normalized by λq, q being an integer power. The largest is q, the smallest is the amplitude of the oscillations. The resolution process is iterative, and each iteration multiplies the accuracy by λ.

It is to be noted that such algorithms are usually written as formal processes, but their convergence is not guaranteed, because of potential resonances between the different involved frequencies. When two frequencies become too close to each other, the process might be destabilized. But usually, this does not happen before a reasonable order, i.e. before a reasonable number of iterations, and this is why such methods can be used. The authors provide numerical tests, which prove the robustness of their algorithm.

Potential applications

Such a study is timely, since dissipation can now be observed. For instance, the variations of the shapes of planetary bodies have been observed by measurements of variations of their gravity fields, which give the tidal Love number k2. k2 has been measured for Mercury, Venus, the Earth, the Moon, Mars, Saturn, and Titan, thanks to space missions. Moreover, its dissipative counterpart, i.e. k2/Q, has been measured for the Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This means that conservations models for the spin-orbit problem are not sufficient anymore.

To know more

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