Customer Reviews

Solar System Dynamics

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Three books on our solar system appeared in the past year or so. Each has its own "flavor." I will review them in turn, but browsers should be aware of the others, so they are listed here: See also, "The New Solar System," J. Kelly Beatty, Carolyn Collins Petersen, Andrew Chalkin, and "The Planetary Scientist's Companion," Katharine Lodders and Bruce Fegley, Jr.

If one of the other books, "The New Solar System" is lacking in mathematics, this volume more than makes up for it. Although my current interest, the Titius/Bode Law, is given only one page of description, it is a full and fair assessment of this astronomical curiosity. The authors immediately follow this on p. 9 by a statement that sums up the flavor of the rest of the book: "...It is Newton's laws that are at work and the subtle gravitational effect that determines the dynamical structure of our solar system is the phenomenon of 'resonance'." Planets do not circle the sun independently, they influence each other's orbits in fascinating and subtle ways, some of which may take billions of years to evolve.

The manifold aspects of "resonance" can be seen in the Chapter headings: The Two-Body Problem, The Restricted Three-Body Problem, Tides, Rotation, and Shape, Spin-Orbit Coupling, The Disturbing Function, Secular Perturbations, Resonant Perturbations, Chaos and Long-Term Evolution, and Planetary Rings.

The mathematics appears to be straightforward, but like most perturbation theory, it is not simple. Calculus is essential, of course. However, I welcome it. It will challenge my curiosity and ability for many years to come.

This is a compelling, must-have book for the advanced student of the science underlying our solar system and probably of other planetary systems as well.

I bought this book hoping to learn about subtleties in the solar system such as horseshoe orbits, shepherding satellites in ring systems, etc. I was richly rewarded. The book goes into deep detail on a large variety of secular and resonant phenomena. But a couple of warnings are appropriate.

First, the book has a very high density of equations, and having studied physics I've seen my share. The math is not too difficult, really (mostly expansions, transformations, etc.), but the authors do not shy away from showing all the details of a calculation. In several chapters expansion follows expansion until the reader is lost in a sea of similar variables. Without spending much more time deriving the results myself, there was no hope of following portions of their development. The book might well have benefitted from tighter editing in this regard; perhaps more of this detail could have been relegated to appendices so that the physical conclusions would stand out more clearly.

Second, there are a lot of errors in the book, both typos in equations and in surrounding text. I easily spotted a number of errors which were obvious even to a neophyte in orbital mechanics like myself. They should not have escaped good proofreading. A Google search for "solar system dynamics errata" (without the quotes) will bring you to a pdf file containing detailed corrections. Kudos to the authors for maintaining such a file! I strongly recommend readers download it and keep it handy while using the book.

Bottom line: tough going but rewarding.

We all know that the solar system is a system centered on the sun (we know that now, needless to say that in Galileo's time you went to jail for saying that). What few of us realize is just how dynamic the solar system really is.

The rings of Saturn were first discovered by Galileo in 1610, but not really understood to be a thin disk of indivudial items until Maxwell in 1859. The rings of Uranus, Neptune and Jupiter weren't really discovered until very recently. Why rings? Why are they spaced the way they are? Why are some of them twisted. And what about comets, some of which have moons of their own?

This is the classic book on how things move in the solar system. It is the world of Newtonian mechanics, but brought forward by 350 years of observatiosn.

This book does not shy away from the mathematics that really describe what's happening. A bit of calculus, including integral calculus, will be needed to get the full impact of what the authors are saying.

As a graduate student in astronomy I highly recommend this book. It gets the job done on a multitude of dynamical topics, and the explanations come in many layers. One can skip to the equations in a relatively easy manner, but in depth derivations are provided.

Among these, the best explanation of what an arbitrary 2-body orbit looks like on the sky.

David

This book is by far my most used/readable textbook. I call it my bible, since I am constantly referring to it for the most fundamental dynamics. So many sections are incredibly useful for us Planetary Scientists and Astronomers. It breaks down in a very easily understandable way many of the complex dynamics such as Perturbation equations, 3 body problems, resonances, and the all mighty disturbing function. If you are in/planning on entering the Astronomy/Planetary Science fields and this book is not on your shelf as you read this, BUY IT! Small price to pay for something so useful.

-Astronomer