Timeline for Do Astronomers really never call Lagrangian points "libration points"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Jun 17, 2020 at 9:47 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| May 7, 2020 at 7:07 | vote | accept | uhoh | ||
| Apr 27, 2020 at 12:35 | answer | added | Peter Erwin | timeline score: 7 | |
| Apr 23, 2020 at 9:51 | comment | added | David Hammen | One could reasonably take the perspective that "Lagrangian point" is not nearly as good a name as is "libration point" from the perspective of performing a literature search. | |
| Apr 23, 2020 at 9:41 | comment | added | David Hammen | If you use google scholar and search for "Lagrangian point", in quotes, the number of hits drops dramatically (by a factor of 100) -- and over half of the remaining hits still have absolutely nothing to do with the five libration points in question. This mismatch is largely due to the use of the use of "Lagrangian point" in fluid dynamics and due to "Lagrangian point of view" matching "Lagrangian point". Searching for "libration point", in quotes, also reduces the number of hits dramatically (by a factor of 10), but from a cursory search, every hit appears to be applicable. | |
| Apr 23, 2020 at 9:36 | comment | added | David Hammen | @mmeent - My bad. I mistakenly typed Lagrangian point as lagrangian point in my ngrams search and did not click case insensitive. That said, the vast majority of the hits on Lagrangian point in a case-insensitive search have absolutely nothing to do with the five libration points that are the subject of this question. You'll find articles / books on fluid dynamics because in that field a Lagrangian point is another name for a tagged particle. You'll find articles / books on taking a Lagrangian point of view, as opposed to a Newtonian point of view or Hamiltonian point of view. And so on. | |
| Apr 23, 2020 at 2:20 | comment | added | uhoh | @mmeent since objects really do seem to "librate" around these points I'm gonna call keep calling them libration points from time to time as will others who do libration point orbits for a living. | |
| Apr 22, 2020 at 21:39 | comment | added | TimRias | @DavidHammen Wow that is a huge distortion of the ngram data. Only between 1955 anf 1972 was "libration points" more common than "Lagrangian points". For "Lagrangian point" it is only between 1960 and 1967 that "libration point" was more popular. | |
| Apr 22, 2020 at 21:26 | comment | added | David Hammen | Also note that Farquhar (of Olympic level fame) and Martin Lo et al. (of interplanetary highway level fame) consistently referred to those points as "libration points" rather than "Lagrange points" (or even worse, "Lagrangian points"). Also note that Euler discovered the linear libration points (now denoted as L1, L2, and L3) before Lagrange discovered the equilateral libration points (L4 and L5). So if those five points are to be collectively named after people, the correct term would be "Euler-Lagrange points" | |
| Apr 22, 2020 at 21:18 | comment | added | David Hammen | @mmeent - Re Note that you will find about 20 times as many google scholar hits referring to "Lagrangian points" as "Lagrangian points" That doesn't make sense. Try again. Also note that if you go to google ngrams for a historical perspective, it shows that "libration points" apparently was the preferred terminology until fairly recently, and that "Lagrangian point" has always trailed well below both "libration point" and "Lagrange point". | |
| Apr 22, 2020 at 0:02 | comment | added | uhoh | @mmeent I see it differently. In astrophysics thing tend to span many orders of magnitude and most things are shown on log scales often covering a half-dozen orders of magnitude or more. $\log_{10}(20)$ is only 1.3 so with an astrophysical perspective those are nearly equal! | |
| Apr 21, 2020 at 14:09 | comment | added | TimRias | Note that you will find about 20 times as many google scholar hits referring to "Lagrangian points" as "Lagrangian points". Within astrophysical error bars 1 in 20 is about the same as never. :) | |
| Apr 21, 2020 at 14:03 | comment | added | uhoh | @DavidHammen thanks, I kinda had a hunch that was so... | |
| Apr 21, 2020 at 13:41 | comment | added | David Hammen | Wayne Hale is completely off base here. Go to scholar.google.com and search for "libration point". You'll find thousands and thousands of refereed journal articles ( "52,700 results") that use "libration point" as a synonym for "Lagrange point". I found none that use libration point to refer to the concept Hale espouses. | |
| Apr 21, 2020 at 8:56 | comment | added | uhoh | @antispinwards From time to time a short but good answer from a knowledgable user is just fine; 1, 2. I'm not sure I can predetermine and articulate "at what point" in this case, let's see how it goes and what evidence turns up | |
| Apr 21, 2020 at 8:48 | comment | added | user24157 | At what point would you accept absence of evidence as being evidence of absence? | |
| Apr 21, 2020 at 8:16 | comment | added | usernumber | I think libration point is used when talking about where the trojan asteroids reside. Since an object can orbit around L4 or L5, it can "balance" or "librate" around those points. But I'm not an astronomer studying trojan asteroids, so this isn't really an answer. | |
| Apr 21, 2020 at 6:07 | history | asked | uhoh | CC BY-SA 4.0 |