On the gravitational fields of Maclaurin spheroid models of rotating fluid planets

Abstract

Hubbard recently derived an important iterative equation for calculating the gravitational coefficients of a Maclaurin spheroid that does not require an expansion in a small distortion parameter. We show that this iterative equation, which is based on an incomplete solution of the Poisson equation, diverges when the distortion parameter is not sufficiently small. We derive a new iterative equation that is based on a complete solution of the Poisson equation and, hence, always converges when calculating the gravitational coefficients of a Maclaurin spheroid. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.