Narrow Results

Applying the Damour–Soffel–Xu framework of general-relativistic celestial mechanics, the theory of relativistic rigid body presented by Thorne and Gürsel is extended and developed in this paper. We successfully construct a quasi-rigid body model in the full post-Newtonian framework for the first time. This model has some simple properties in a similar way to the Newtonian rigid body, and it could be applied in geodynamics and astronomy, for example, to solve problems on rotation or precession of celestial bodies when relativistic effects are not negligible.

We use surface adapted ellipsoidal coordinates to obtain a first order post-Newtonian (PN) approximation to Dedekind ellipsoids with the intention of proceeding to higher orders.