English

Eccentricity generation in hierarchical triple systems with coplanar and initially circular orbits

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2014-08-26 v1

Abstract

We develop a technique for estimating the inner eccentricity in hierarchical triple systems with well separated components. We investigate systems with initially circular and coplanar orbits and comparable masses. The technique is based on an expansion of the rate of change of the Runge-Lenz vector for calculating short period terms by using first order perturbation theory. The combination of the short period terms with terms arising from octupole level secular theory, results in the derivation of a rather simple formula for the eccentricity of the inner binary. The theoretical results are tested against numerical integrations of the full equations of motion. Comparison is also made with other results on the subject.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1408.5462,
  title  = {Eccentricity generation in hierarchical triple systems with coplanar and initially circular orbits},
  author = {Nikolaos Georgakarakos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.5462},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

This is a preprint of an article published in MNRAS in 2002. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0811.1146

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:37:25.160Z