Abstract
Newton’s laws of motion and gravity come together to explain the motion of planets around the Sun, plus a wide range of other astrophysical systems. In this chapter we study a system in which the source of gravity (e.g., the Sun) is stationary and a single object (e.g., a planet) is in motion. While Newton’s third law tells us that a planet’s gravitational pull must also cause the Sun to move, the Sun is so much more massive than any planet that its motion can be neglected as a first approximation.
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Notes
- 1.
Special versions of these terms are used for certain situations: perigee/apogee for an orbit around Earth, and perihelion/aphelion for an orbit around the Sun.
- 2.
X-ray astronomers often quote energy rather than frequency or wavelength using the quantum relation \(E = h\nu = hc/\lambda\).
- 3.
Maser originally stood for “microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” although “microwave” is now sometimes replaced by “molecular.” A laser is similar to a maser except that it operates in the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (the “l” stands for “light,” specifically meaning visible light).
- 4.
We quantify this idea in terms of a gravitational “sphere of influence” in Sect. 3.3.1.
- 5.
For comparison, the energy released by fusion in stars corresponds to an efficiency \(\varepsilon = 0.007\) (see Sect. 15.2).
- 6.
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Keeton, C. (2014). Gravitational One-Body Problem. In: Principles of Astrophysics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9236-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9236-8_3
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