| Figure 2: Effect of the gravitomagnetic
force on the hyperbolic motion of a test particle around an astronomical
rotating body located at the origin of the depicted frame. The body spin is directed along the positive axis, that is, outside the figure. Red line:
unperturbed hyperbola. Blue dashed line: perturbed orbit. For illustrative
purposes, we choose the Earth as central body and rescaled the magnitude of its
gravitomagnetic force by so that at perigee. We adopted the initial conditions ;
the particle moves in the equatorial plane of the spinning Earth in such a way
that the radius vector rotates in the same sense with respect to the Earth,
that is, anticlockwise. We used km, .
The perturbed orbit is deflected outward with respect to the unperturbed
one. |
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