General Post-Newtonian Orbital Effects

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.