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Tidal Locking And The Gravitational Fold Catastrophe, Andrea Ferroglia, Miguel C. N. Fiolhais
Tidal Locking And The Gravitational Fold Catastrophe, Andrea Ferroglia, Miguel C. N. Fiolhais
Publications and Research
The purpose of this work is to study the phenomenon of tidal locking in a pedagogical framework by analyzing the effective gravitational potential of a two-body system with two spinning objects. It is shown that the effective potential of such a system is an example of a fold catastrophe. In fact, the existence of a local minimum and saddle point, corresponding to tidally locked circular orbits, is regulated by a single dimensionless control parameter that depends on the properties of the two bodies and on the total angular momentum of the system. The method described in this work results in …