Computer assisted proof of drift orbits along normally hyperbolic manifolds. II: Application to the restricted three body problem (Q2137348)

The authors present a computer assisted proof of diffusion in the planar elliptic restricted three-body problem. They treat the elliptic problem as a perturbation of the circular problem, where the eccentricity of the primary masses is the perturbation parameter. The unperturbed system preserves the energy, and for perturbations which are sufficiently small it is shown that the orbits exhibit energy changes, irrespective of the size of the perturbation. Without perturbation, the system has a normally hyperbolic invariant manifold with stable and unstable manifolds which intersect transversally. This is called ``apriori-chaotic'' system. Their diffusion mechanism is based on establishing the existence of trajectories that shadow the intersections of the stable and unstable manifolds and change energy under the influence of the perturbation. The authors apply their results using the mass of Jupiter and a massless particle, which corresponds to the comet Oterna, and they assume that the eccentricity of the system is sufficiently small.