Erratum: “On the Orbital Elements of the Two-body Problem with Slowly Decreasing Mass: The Gyldén–Mestchersky Cases” (2020, AJ, 160, 203)

Abstract

In Abad et al., we studied the time evolution of orbital elements in the so-called “Gyldén–Mestchersky cases.” Actually the plots represent the evolution of orbital elements with respect to the eccentric anomaly, related with time through Kepler’s equation. When reproducing figures with respect to time, they are globally similar to the ones we obtained but with slight differences, as T. Kramer informed us. In this note we aim to amend the errors in the figure captions and also to explain the way we computed orbital elements, in particular the eccentricity, by means of a continuous explicit function of the mean anomaly, with no need to solve Kepler’s equation at each instant of the time interval.