General Post-Newtonian Orbital Effects : From Earth's Satellites to the Galactic Centre

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 sources, 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.