# Tag Info

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I don't know if I understand your question correctly, but can't Celestia do what you want?

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There is NASA/JPL's Solar System Simulator. It doesn't cover all points, but does include many of the interesting ones.

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As ganbustein says, this is not too difficult to imagine. The simplest case (approximating with circular orbits and only the Sun, Earth and Satellite) would have the satellite orbit orthogonally to the Earth with a 1 year orbit. The Satellite will pass the Earth orbit plane in two places, call these "down crossing" and "up crossing" points. To minimize ...

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Maybe move your planar restricted problem to a 3D orbital restricted one. (i.e. first two bodies in fixed orbit then solve for third body off the plane)

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Is there any resource that provides these current values? Yes. The JPL HORIZONS on-line solar system data and ephemeris computation service provides these values, and much more.

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According to wikipedia and other sources, a planet and a star always move in a circular orbit around the common center of mass of the both bodies ... This is not true. In the absence of other gravitational sources, a planet and a star move in elliptical orbits about the common center of mass. Ancient scientists assumed circular orbits, but only because ...

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The trajectory of Earth's orbit is shaped not only by Sun's gravity. Earth's orbit is being changed by different sources of gravity as well, for example center of our galaxy. This is why it's not perfectly round.

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Sure. Imagine an object orbiting the Sun in a plane normal to the plane of Earth's orbit. Let AB the the intersection of these two planes. (Imagine that A and B are points on the celestial sphere. We're not interested for now in distance from the Sun.) Then the only time the Sun hides the Earth from the object is when the object is at A and the Earth is at ...

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I could imagine a polar orbit that is in a plane which rotates to stay orthogonal to the direction of the Earth. The rotation would be very slow and match the revolution rate of the Earth. The satellite path would be similar to how a ball of yarn is wound. There's nothing too fancy about this (you could do the same switching Earth and the Sun), so I ...

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Tracy Cramer is correct. Early in the life of the universe it is thought that star formation in "metal-free" gas favoured larger stars. These had short lives and very quickly enriched the interstellar and intergalactic medium with nucleosynthesis products. In fact the enrichment of the interstellar medium (ISM) in our own Galaxy is thought to have mainly ...

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Are you asking why there isn't more mass in the planetary system? The reasons go back to the collapse and fragmentation of the protostellar cloud and the subsequent accretion (from a pseudo-spherical envelope) of the bulk of the protostellar material. It has little to do with subsequent processes occurring in the accretion disc. If the disc had too much ...

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I feel that HDE gives a good start of an answer, but stops short of the important part. We have seen in HDE's answer the formation of a star at the center of the collapsing molecular cloud. When the star begins to fuse lighter elements, the protoplanetary disk has several forces acting on it: The momentum of the particles in the disk. The gravity of the ...

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It's because of the Sun. It might be good if I give a quick overview on star formation before I get to the meat of the issue. Here's star formation in a few simple steps: Giant Molecular Cloud forms. A large region of gas and dust, essentially a dense version of the interstellar medium, coalesces into an interstellar cloud. GMCs can be tens or hundreds of ...

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This is a part answer to your question, based on some recent research of the photochemical behaviour modelled and observed for Titan's tholin haze and modelling of Titan's stratosphere. The process appears to begin, according to the paper Ice condensation layers in Titan’s Stratosphere (Barth, 2012) (Abstract only - paywalled), with Photochemical ...

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You must apply Newton's law $$m\frac{\mathrm{d}\boldsymbol{v}}{\mathrm{d}t} = \boldsymbol{F}$$ which related the force $\boldsymbol{F}$ to the acceleration (=change of velocity). Note that positions, velocities, and forces are all vector quantities. Also note that as the objects move (change position), their mutual forces change (both direction and ...

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IAU failed to understand that the concept "planet" is a cultural concept, not a scientific concept, not any more anyway. Of course there's no distinct objective scientific definition between what is a planet and what is not. Mercury and Jupiter in the same category? Yeah, right, as if that clarifies what we are talking about when we use the word "planet"! ...

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