[SPACE] Co-orbital Habitable Planets

dataweaver · 07-17-2013, 09:07 PM

Surfing the web today, I ran across an article about co-orbital configurations; in particular, the unique case of Saturn's moons Epimetheus and Janus caught my eye, and I'd like to see about putting together a situation involving a pair of planets co-orbiting in a star's habitable zone in the same manner. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find anything on the specifics of the underlying math, meaning that I'm unable to make appropriate determinations on such questions as the frequency of orbital swaps, how close the planets would be to each other at the point of closest approach, and what the effective eccentricity of the shared orbit would be (which factors in to the impact on each planet's climate). Can anyone help with this?

07-17-2013, 09:07 PM	#1
dataweaver Join Date: Aug 2004	[SPACE] Co-orbital Habitable Planets Surfing the web today, I ran across an article about co-orbital configurations; in particular, the unique case of Saturn's moons Epimetheus and Janus caught my eye, and I'd like to see about putting together a situation involving a pair of planets co-orbiting in a star's habitable zone in the same manner. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find anything on the specifics of the underlying math, meaning that I'm unable to make appropriate determinations on such questions as the frequency of orbital swaps, how close the planets would be to each other at the point of closest approach, and what the effective eccentricity of the shared orbit would be (which factors in to the impact on each planet's climate). Can anyone help with this? __________________ Point balance is a myth.[1][2][3][4]