MILESTONES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CELESTIAL MECHANICS

Abstract

A brief outline of the development of ideas and a review of some achievements in modern celestial mechanics are given. The emphasis is on the fact that the classical definition of this science given by Laplace does not fully reflect the content of modern celestial mechanics, and the term dynamic astronomy is more capacious. Dynamic astronomy studies almost everything that moves and rotates in space: from dust particles to comets and asteroids, from satellites, planets and their satellites to stars and galaxies. This complex science includes not only the problems of classical, but also relativistic celestial mechanics, it includes the theory of equilibrium figures, various computational methods and computer simulation methods. Qualitative methods are of great importance, the culmination of which was the creation of the KAM theory. The development of celestial mechanics went through the practice of various applications, and the range of problems in it is exceptionally wide. A striking stimulus for the development of dynamical astronomy was the discovery of exoplanets around other stars. The article traces a chain of ideas from Keplerian orbits to osculating Lagrangian ellipses, from two-body problems to many-body problems, from Gaussian rings to models built on the basis of precessing analogues of these rings.