# Tag Info

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There are, I think, at least four parts to this argument: the first being the theoretical argument that ties it all together and the remainder being observational evidence for the Moon's orbit increasing in size. 1. The underlying theoretical argument. This, of course, is the idea that tidal braking causes the Earth to slow down in its rotation and the Moon ...

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@BMF's comment links to (Gold & Soter 1969) Icarus 11, (3), November 1969, pp 356-366 Atmospheric tides and the resonant rotation of Venus. Since it is paywalled I'll add a short summary: From the abstract: The observed spin-orbit resonance of Venus, whereby the same side of Venus faces the Earth at each inferior conjunction, cannot be explained ...

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In the protostar stage of the Sun, it was surrounded by a (spinning) gas cloud. This cloud behaved like a fluid (well, a gas is a fluid), so it flattened out into an accretion disk due to conservation of angular momentum. The planets eventually formed from the dust/gas in the disk from compression of the dust in the disk. This process won't end up moving the ...

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Leconte et al. (2015) suggested that the presence of an atmosphere could prevent or at least slow tidal locking. The star should exert two separate torques: one on the atmosphere and one on the solid body of the planet: $$T_a=-\frac{3}{2}K_ab_a(2\omega-2n),\quad T_g=-\frac{3}{2}K_gb_g(2\omega-2n)$$ where $$K_a\equiv\frac{3M_*R_p^3}{5\bar{\rho}a^3},\quad K_g\... 14 Pluto will never be a planet. There are a number of technical papers that give more precise meaning to the concept of "clearing the neighborhood". It's not just now, it's can the object in question clear the neighborhood of its path while the Sun is still a star. In the case of Pluto, Ceres, Eris, and a host of other not-quite-planet objects, that will not ... 13 This is a fun little problem that's remarkably close and the math is pretty easy when you use the right periods. Venus' synodic period, relative to Earth, is 583.92 days on average. He uses 584, but lets strive for accuracy. Venus' solar day is 116.75 days, so 5 solar days is 583.75 days - Venus does 5 rotations in nearly the same amount of time that ... 8 The orbit of an astronomical body around another astronomical body is an ellipse, with the primary in one of the two focal points of the ellipse. Thus the orbiting body gets closer to the primary until it reaches its closest point, and then gets farther away from the primary until it reaches its farthest point, and then gets closer again. When an ... 7 Tidal locking occurs because the planet deforms the satellite into an oval, with long axis pointing towards the planet. If the satellite is rotating the long axis will move away from being pointing towards the planet, and the gravity of the planet will tend to pull it back, slowing the rotation until one face is permanently facing the planet. Tidal locking ... 7 Hill sphere is named after John William Hill (1812–1879) and its simple logic follows from the presence of three bodies (let's assume Sun is the largest mass with Earth as the secondary mass and a satellite of negligible mass orbiting the Earth as the third mass), where the radius of the Hill sphere will be the largest radius at which a satellite could orbit ... 7 Yes: It has a companion planet or an excessively large moon, with the two bodies orbiting their common center of mass (much like the Earth and the Moon). They could be tidally-locked to each other, but they cannot be tidally-locked to their star. 7 The question says a few interesting things: The system orbit isn't on the ecliptic The system hasn't cleared its neighbourhood These are not going to change in the next few million years - or ever. Orcus is an interesting counter-example. It is in a similar orbit to Pluto - similar aphelion, perihelion and eccentricity, similar orbital period (to within ... 7 This is directly related to another question: Why are asteroids with zero orbital inclination rare? If captured, irregular moons are randomly oriented in space then there is very little chance of them having either inclination angles near zero or near 180^\circ. This is because, if they are uniformly distributed in space, the fraction of orbits within a ... 6 According to Wikipedia, the orbital relationship between Venus and the Earth is coincidental and not because they are locked in a true orbital resonance, but it may be due to a true resonance in the past, or the system may be evolving toward a resonance in the future. A number of near-integer-ratio relationships between the orbital frequencies of the ... 5 The more likely case is actually a spin-orbit resonance that is not 1:1 but a half odd multiple, like the 3:2 case of our own Mercury. Having eccentricity in the orbit encourages this situation. I’ve been meaning to write this up on the Worldbuilding.SE but I have not re-found enough references. But see this video. 5 There may be some three-body periodic solutions that orbit around a common point, but in general they get a little crazy-looking and may not always contain an immediately obvious center of mass from casual observation. But of course it will always exist. If you watch closely, you'll see that whenever one body reaches the intersection point, all three are on ... 5 The sun still rises in the East and sets in the West. So you quickly identify the cardinal directions. By observing the point around which the stars rotate each night you can find the altitude of the pole, which gives you your latitude. You can't find your absolute longitude, but with good time keeping you can find your longitude relative to your starting ... 5 Your understanding of the illumination is correct. k is the ratio of the illuminated length BC to the diameter AC. New Moon has an illumination of 0, Full Moon an illumination of 1, and the quarter phase an illumination of 0.5. The position angle is measured counterclockwise from north (celestial north, along a line of right ascension) to the bright limb C. ... 4 Which is the least massive object? Quoting Wikipedia, In the hierarchical, restricted three-body problem, it is assumed that the satellite has negligible mass compared with the other two bodies (the "primary" and the "perturber"), . . . This is the case studied in Kozai (1962), specifically, the case of asteroids being perturbed by Jupiter. While not ... 4 There's no reason why 2 bodies of equal mass couldn't have elliptical orbits around each other. There's an example of that here . The simple way to think about this is, if two bodies of similar mass approach each other, one of two things can happen, they either have sufficient velocity to pass each other with some hyperbolic curving of both objects ... 4 Since I'm a hobbyist, I usually wait to see if someone a bit smarter wants to answer first, but I can give a couple thoughts on this. Hot Jupiters are thought to have migrated inwards, implying that another giant planet has been ejected in order to conserve the orbital momentum of those planetary systems. In the article you posted (I'll pull the ... 4 If this is a possible periodic solution for a three-body problem? What you've posted here is the classic "figure 8" orbit for a 3 body system. Originally the 3-body system was an unsolvable mathematics problem, until people started using computers to do the math for us. Recently, a set of 13 "stable" 3-body orbits have been found which were published in ... 4 Wikipedia gives the formula$$t_{\text{lock}} \approx \frac{\omega a^6 I Q}{3 G m_p^2 k_2 R^5} where $\omega$ is the initial spin rate expressed in radians per second, $a$ is the semi-major axis of the motion of the satellite around the central body (given by the average of the periapsis and apoapsis distances), $I\approx 0.4 m_s R^2$ is the moment of ...

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Certainly, the figure only uses different masses because that's the more general possibility (after all, the two masses won't be exactly the same). In fact, if you look at the distribution over mass ratio q in binary systems in Figure 1b in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.3123.pdf, it seems that the cumulative number of binaries with mass ratio less than q is ...

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Why would precession affect the motion of the other planets? First things first: That's an unreferenced portion of a wikipedia article. That said, a perfectly spherical body acts exactly like a point mass in Newtonian mechanics. A non-spherical body does not. The Earth's equatorial bulge has a significant effect on satellites in low Earth orbit. Sun ...

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Short Answer: The gravitation of Jupiter and all the other planets makes Kepler’s third law a bit less accurate than it would be if their gravity were zero. The gravitational interaction between the planets, however, doesn’t have much effect on either the period or semi-major axis of any of the planets, especially in the short term. Long Answer: You might ...

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The solar perturbations on most of the satellites of Uranus are on a very small scale indeed, which may explain the absence of the instabilities noted in the question. A perturbational effect depends on the scale of the solar perturbing accelerations relative to the ordinary inverse-square attraction of the primary body. The scale factor (often designated ...

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That depends on the accuracy you want to work with. To zeroth order, as outlined in Murray & Dermott, "Solar System dynamics", Chapt 3., you can do the following: The zero-velocity contours that are plotted in your image will not be coinciding with particle orbits to infinite precision, but they're a good zeroth order approximation for objects with low ...

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