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Two bodies orbiting a common center of mass, indicated by the red plus. The larger body has a higher mass, and therefore a smaller orbit and a lower orbital velocity than its lower-mass companion. The binary mass function follows from Kepler's third law when the radial velocity of one binary component is known. [1]
The Tusi couple (also known as Tusi's mechanism [1] [2] [3]) is a mathematical device in which a small circle rotates inside a larger circle twice the diameter of the smaller circle. Rotations of the circles cause a point on the circumference of the smaller circle to oscillate back and forth in linear motion along a diameter of the larger circle.
Dividing both force equations by the respective masses, subtracting the second equation from the first, and rearranging gives the equation ¨ = ¨ ¨ = = (+) where we have again used Newton's third law F 12 = −F 21 and where r is the displacement vector from mass 2 to mass 1, as defined above. The force between the two objects, which ...
In astronomy, minimum mass is the lower-bound calculated mass of observed objects such as planets, stars, binary systems, [1] nebulae, [2] and black holes. Minimum mass is a widely cited statistic for extrasolar planets detected by the radial velocity method or Doppler spectroscopy, and is determined using the binary mass function .
The left-hand circle in Figure 2 is the orbit showing the velocity vectors at two adjacent times. On the right, these two velocities are moved so their tails coincide. Because speed is constant, the velocity vectors on the right sweep out a circle as time advances.
The equatorial plane is the plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the central body. An inclination of 30° could also be described using an angle of 150°. The convention is that the normal orbit is prograde, an orbit in the same direction as the planet rotates. Inclinations greater than 90° describe retrograde orbits (backward). Thus:
L 1, L 2 and L 3 are the Lagrangian points where forces (considered in the rotating frame) cancel out. Mass can flow through the saddle point L 1 from one star to its companion, if the star fills its Roche lobe. [1] STL 3D model of the Roche potential of two orbiting bodies, rendered half as a surface and half as a mesh
However, if both the difference in mass between the two bodies and the distance between them are relatively small, each may be tidally locked to the other; this is the case for Pluto and Charon, and for Eris and Dysnomia. Alternative names for the tidal locking process are gravitational locking, [2] captured rotation, and spin–orbit locking.