- 4404 - PLANETS - why is solar system flat? - Have all 8 planets in our solar system ever aligned? All eight planets will never truly be in a straight line, but they can get close to it. The Sun, followed by Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune & Pluto.
---------------------------- 4404 - PLANETS - why is solar system flat?
- The last time the eight planets were
grouped within 30 degrees of each other was January 1, 1665. As the solar system's planets rove around
the sun, sometimes a few will appear to line up in the sky.
-
- It depends on how generous you are with the
definition of "align" for the solar system's planets: Mercury, Venus,
Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. To start with, the orbits of the planets are
all tilted to different degrees with respect to the sun's equator. This means
that, when planets appear to line up in the sky, in reality they are likely not
positioned in a straight line in 3D space.
-
- The concept of planetary alignment is more
about the visual appearance from our perspective on Earth rather than any
significant physical alignment in space.
-
- A planetary conjunction is when two or more
planets appear close together from our perspective on Earth. It's important to
note that the planets are never actually close together. Even when two planets
appear lined up to a person on Earth, they are still extremely far apart in
space.
-
- The definition of how close the planets can
appear to be considered aligned is not well defined. If you measured the distance around the
circle of the entire horizon, that would equal 360 degrees. To give an idea of
the horizon's enormity, the full moon appears only half a degree across, the
diameter of the full Moon.
-
- Astronomer have calculated that the three
innermost planets — Mercury, Venus and Earth — "line up within 3.6 degrees
on average every 39.6 years" .
-
- Lining up more planets takes time. All eight planets will line up within 3.6
degrees every 396 billion years. Which
means it has never occurred and will not occur, since the sun will transform
into a white dwarf in roughly 6 billion years from now. During this process,
the sun will become a red giant and expand in size to swallow both Mercury and
Venus, and probably the Earth as well. Thus, only five planets will remain in
our solar system.
-
- The chances are worse for all eight planets
aligning within 1 degree of sky. This
will occur, on average, every 13.4 trillion years. In comparison, the universe
is about 13.8 billion years old.
-
- If you consider the eight planets aligned
if they are in the same 180-degree-wide patch of sky, the next time that will
happen is May 6, 2492. The last time the eight planets were grouped within 30
degrees was Jan. 1, 1665, and the next time will be March 20, 2673.
- Planetary alignments have virtually no
significant physical effects on Earth.
The only impact to life on Earth during an alignment is the wonderful
display visible in the sky. There is no
danger of enhanced earthquakes or anything like that. The change in the
gravitational force that the Earth will experience due to any planetary
alignment is negligible.
-
- Why do the planets in the solar system even
orbit on the same plane? A model of the solar system usually shows that
the sun, planets, moons and asteroids sit roughly on the same plane.
-
- About 4.5 billion years ago the solar system
was just a massive, spinning cloud of dust and gas. That massive cloud measured 12,000
astronomical units (AU) across; 1 AU is the average distance between Earth and
the sun, or about 93 million miles. That cloud became so big, that even though
it was just filled with dust and gas molecules, the cloud itself started to
collapse and shrink under its own mass.
-
- As the spinning cloud of dust and gas
started to collapse, it also flattened. Imagine a pizza maker throwing a
spinning slab of dough into the air. As it spins, the dough expands but becomes
increasingly thin and flat. That's what happened to the very early solar
system.
-
- Meanwhile, in the center of this
ever-flattening cloud, all those gas molecules got squeezed together so much,
they heated up. Under the immense heat and pressure, hydrogen and helium atoms
fused and kick-started a billions-of-years-long nuclear reaction in the form of
a baby star: the sun.
-
- Over the next 50 million years, the sun
continued to grow, collecting gas and dust from its surroundings and burping
out waves of intense heat and radiation. Slowly, the growing sun cleared out a
doughnut of empty space around it.
-
- As the sun grew, the cloud continued to
collapse, forming "a disk around the star that becomes flatter and flatter
and expands and expands with the sun at the center.
-
- Eventually, the cloud became a flat
structure called a protoplanetary disk, orbiting the young star. The disk
stretched hundreds of AU across and was just one-tenth of that distance thick.
-
- For tens of millions of years thereafter,
the dust particles in the protoplanetary disk gently swirled around,
occasionally knocking into each other. Some even stuck together. And over those
millions of years, those particles became millimeter-long grains, and those
grains became centimeter-long pebbles, and the pebbles continued to collide and
stick together.
-
- Eventually, most of the material in the
protoplanetary disk stuck together to form huge objects. Some of those objects
grew so big that gravity shaped them into spherical planets, dwarf planets and
moons. Other objects became irregularly shaped, like asteroids, comets and some
small moons.
-
- Despite these objects' different sizes,
they stayed more or less on the same plane, where their building materials
originated. That's why, even today, the solar system's eight planets and other
celestial bodies orbit on roughly the same level.
-
-
March 26, 2023 PLANETS - why
is solar system flat? 4404
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