New book: “General Post-Newtonian Orbital Effects From Earth’s Satellites to the Galactic Center” (CUP)

The forthcoming book “General Post-Newtonian Orbital Effects. From Earth’s Satellites to the Galactic Center” has been announced by the Cambridge University Press. Orbital motions have always been used to test gravitational theories which, from time to time, have challenged the then-dominant paradigms. This book provides a unified treatment for calculating a wide variety of orbital effects due to general relativity and modified models of gravity, to its first and second post-Newtonian orders, in full generality. It gives explicit results valid for arbitrary orbital configurations and spin axes of the primaries, without a-priori simplifying assumptions on either the orbital eccentricity or inclination. These general results apply to a range of phenomena, from Earth’s artificial satellites to the S-stars orbiting the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre, to binary and triple pulsars, exoplanets and interplanetary probes. Readers will become acquainted with working out a variety of orbital effects other than the time-honoured perihelion precession, designing their own space-based tests, performing effective sensitivity analyses and assessing realistic error-budgets.