Double-averaging can fail to characterize the long-term evolution of Lidov–Kozai Cycles and derivation of an analytical correction

The double-averaging (DA) approximation is widely employed as the standard technique in studying the secular evolution of the hierarchical three-body system. We show that effects stemmed from the short-time-scale oscillations ignored by DA can accumulate over long time-scales and lead to significant errors in the long-term evolution of the Lidov–Kozai cycles. In particular, the conditions for having an orbital flip, where the inner orbit switches between prograde and retrograde with respect to the outer orbit and the associated extremely high eccentricities during the switch, can be modified significantly. The failure of DA can arise for a relatively strong perturber where the mass of the tertiary is considerable compared to the total mass of the inner binary. This issue can be relevant for astrophysical systems such as stellar triples, planets in stellar binaries, stellar-mass binaries orbiting massive black holes and moons of the planets perturbed by the Sun. We derive analytical equations for the short-term oscillations of the inner orbit to the leading order for all inclinations, eccentricities and mass ratios. Under the test particle approximation, we derive the ‘corrected double-averaging’ (CDA) equations by incorporating the effects of short-term oscillations into the DA. By comparing to N-body integrations, we show that the CDA equations successfully correct most of the errors of the long-term evolution under the DA approximation for a large range of initial conditions. We provide an implementation of CDA that can be directly added to codes employing DA equations.