Helical motion of elastic spheres

Abstract

We study the elastic deformations that appear due to tidal and centrifugal forces acting on an elastic sphere in helical motion in a spherically symmetric gravitational field, where gravity is considered to be given by either a Newtonian or a Schwarzschild background. We review an existence/uniqueness theorem based on the implicit function theorem for the nonrelativistic case and give explicit solutions to the linearized elastostatic equations in both cases.