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9

It is a co-incidence. The units are what you need to look at, in both the speed of light and the distance of the Sun the units of length are the same (m) (your ratio is $\approx 0.002 s^{-1}$ when you use metres as the unit for the distance to the Sun). The definition of the second is in a sense arbitrary and is a consequence of how we have chosen to ...

3

The heat production inside moons is due to tidal heating. Due to this, the orbit of the moon would change. The orbital and rotational energy of the moon is dissipated as heat either in the surface ocean or in the interior of the moon. This is especially seen in the moons of large planets, for example Io. Io, being Jupiter's innermost moon, is pulled by ...

3

This video provides a visual answer: https://youtu.be/MTY1Kje0yLg?t=3m24s objects orbiting in different directions are more likely to collide with each other. By the process of elimination, eventually one direction of orbit dominates.

3

Pure coincidence. Your result of 2 is better written as 2 meters/kilometer/second. If we had six fingers on each hand we would probably use base twelve rather than base ten. A base 12 metric system would have 1728 (in our base 10) meters in a kilometer. Your coincidence would vanish in a twelve-fingered world. Our Earth takes 86400 seconds to make one ...

2

Perigee is the Earth-specific name for periapsis. People use longitude (which is a composite angle rather than an angle) because this solves the problems of circular and equatorial orbits. The reason you need to use an epoch time to specify the Moon's argument of perigee and longitude of ascending node is because the Moon's orbit about the Earth precesses. ...

1

In different systems, the cloud that creates it starts with one direction of angular momentum (spin). This is because of the initial conditions as the gas cloud collapsed in on itself to create a star and planets around it. However, some orbits will move in the opposite direction but will normally be destroyed due to collisions with other orbits in the ...

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