Coupling the non-gravitational forces and Modified Newton Dynamics for cometary orbits

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Modified Newton Dynamics (MOND) influences cometary orbits, especially for comets with large semi-major axes, and compares these effects to non-gravitational forces caused by sublimation.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of MOND effects on specific comets and compares them to non-gravitational forces, highlighting their significance for orbital modeling.

Findings

MOND effects are significant for comets with large semi-major axes.

MOND perturbations can be comparable to non-gravitational forces.

Different MOND functions produce varying orbital variations.

Abstract

In recent work (Milgrom 2009, Blanchet & Novak 2011), the authors showed that MOdified Newton Dynamics (MOND) have a non-negligible secular perturbation effect on planets with large semi-major axes (gaseous planets) in the Solar System. Some comets also have a very eccentric orbit with a large semi-major axis (Halley family comets) going far away from the Sun (more than 15 AU) in a low acceleration regime where they would be subject to MOND perturbation. They also approach the Sun very closely (less than 3 AU) and are affected by the sublimation of ices from their nucleus, triggering so-called non-gravitational forces. The main goal of this paper is to investigate the effect of MOND perturbation on three comets with various orbital elements (2P/Encke, 1P/Halley and 153P/Ikeya-Zhang) and then compare it to the non-gravitational perturbations. It is motivated by the fact that when fitting an outgassing model for a comet, we have to take into account all of the small perturbing effects to avoid absorbing these effects into the non-gravitational parameters. Otherwise, we could derive a completely wrong estimation of the outgassing. For this work, we use six different forms of MOND functions and compute the secular variations of the orbital elements due to MOND and non-gravitational perturbations. We show that, for comets with large semi-major axis, the MONDian effects are not negligible compared to the non-gravitational perturbations.