Degenerate Conic - Degenerate Ellipse With Semiminor Axis of Zero

Degenerate Ellipse With Semiminor Axis of Zero

Another type of degeneration occurs when an ellipse, rotated and translated to its simplest form, has its semiminor axis b go to zero and thus has its eccentricity go to one. The result is a line segment (degenerate because the ellipse is not differentiable at the endpoints) with its foci at the endpoints. As an orbit, this is a radial elliptic trajectory.

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