From the Greek for ‘mass’ and ‘mid-point’, barycenter is the term employed for the center of mass of a system of gravitationally interacting bodies. The barycenter has dynamical significance in that the motion of the barycenter is equivalent to the motion of the system as a whole.
Although one may define a barycenter for any system of interacting bodies, such as the planet and satellite system of Jupiter, the examples most often encountered in planetary science are the solar system barycenter and the Earth—Moon barycenter. The solar system barycenter is the origin of the solar system inertial frame (or ‘local standard of rest’). This is the fundamental coordinate system of Newtonian dynamics. If the totality of the solar system angular momentum were represented as a vector, that vector would originate at the system barycenter and point in the direction of motion of the solar system in its orbit about the center of the galaxy.
For observational purposes it is customary to use...
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Shirley, J.H., Fairbridge, R.W. (1997). Barycenter . In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4520-4_38
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