The disturbing function may be expanded in harmonics of the planets' orbital angles. Its terms fall into three useful classes:
- short-period orbital perturbations involve rapidly varying combinations of mean longitudes and produce bounded oscillations associated with conjunctions;
- mean-motion resonance terms have a nearly stationary integer combination of mean longitudes and apsidal angles, so repeated conjunctions act coherently and can drive libration, migration, or eccentricity growth;
- secular perturbations survive averaging over both mean longitudes and describe slow exchange of eccentricity and apsidal precession.
Articles by others on the same topic
There are currently no matching articles.