Natural orbit approximations in single power-law potentials

TL;DR

This paper enhances simple orbit approximation methods in power-law potentials, achieving high accuracy for nearly radial orbits through perturbation expansions, matching techniques, and correction functions, revealing new insights into precession rates and periodic orbits.

Contribution

It introduces improved orbit approximation techniques in power-law potentials, including perturbation expansions and correction functions, for high-eccentricity orbits, with insights into precession and periodic orbits.

Findings

High-accuracy orbit fits for high eccentricities.

Precession rate scales as log(1-e) at high eccentricity.

New understanding of periodic orbit occurrence.

Abstract

In a previous paper, I demonstrated the accuracy of simple, precessing, power ellipse (p-ellipse) approximations to orbits of low-to-moderate eccentricity in power-law potentials. Here I explore several extensions of these approximations to improve accuracy, especially for nearly radial orbits. 1) It is found that moderately improved orbital fits can be achieved with higher order perturbation expansions (in eccentricity), with the addition of `harmonic' terms to the solution. 2) Alternately, a matching of the extreme radial excursions of an orbit can be imposed, and a more accurate estimate of the eccentricity parameter is obtained. However, the error in the precession frequency is usually increased. 3) A correction function of small magnitude corrects the frequency problem. With this correction, even first order approximations yield excellent fits at quite high eccentricity over a range of potential indices that includes flat and falling rotation curve cases. 4) Adding a first harmonic term to fit the breadth of the orbital loops, and determining the fundamental and harmonic coefficients by matching to three orbital positions further improves the fit. With a couple of additional small corrections one obtains excellent fits to orbits with radial ranges of more than a thousand for some potentials. These simple corrections to the basic p-ellipse are basically in the form of several successive approximations, and can provide high accuracy. They suggest new results including that the apsidal precession rate scales approximately as $log(1-e)$ at very high eccentricities $e$. New insights are also provided on the occurrence of periodic orbits in various potentials, especially at high eccentricity.