Movement of the Solar System?
Question:
Answer:
to say that gravity controls the movement, is to say that everything is always falling.
consider when you hit a tennis ball, level.
what happens?
it goes straight at first, then seems to fall?
no.
it starts to fall as soon as it's hit, although it takes a while before you can see it.
so, what if you hit it harder?
really harder.
so hard that as it fell, it would have gone part way around the earth.
in fact, so hard that the curve of it's fall matched the curve of the earth.
what would you have?
a satellite. (let's skip air friction for a bit.)
suppose you tennis ball got bigger, and farther away.
maybe 2,000 miles in diameter, and 240,000 miles away.
it would still constantly fall toward the earth.
but it's forward momentum would carry it around.
but note that, it's still falling.
all the time.
suppose your tennis ball got even bigger, say 8,000 miles in diameter.
and you hit it around the sun.
it would constantly fall toward the sun.
but if you hit it hard enough, it's forward momentum would be balanced by the amount that it fell, and it would be in a stable orbit around the sun.
okay, suppose you had an 800,000 mile diameter ball, and hit it around the galaxy.
-- ok, ok, it's getting boring.
but it really is all the same.
everything is falling.
and the falling is balanced by the momentum that each object has.
from a golf ball, to a tennis ball, to the space station, to the moon and earth and sun, and, in fact, the milky way galaxy.
if you'll permit, i'd like to show you one more thing.
there are 2 moons of saturn that have the same orbit.
almost.
occasionally one almost catches the other.
when that happens, the moon that does the catching:
1. gets more energy,
2. moves to a slightly higher orbit,
3. and increases it's orbital period.
that allows the moon that got caught to:
1. lose a bit of energy,
2. move to a lower orbit,
3, and decrease it's orbital period, so that it then pulls ahead of the other moon. and catches up to it in a few years.
personally, i think that's just about as cool as it gets in our solar system.
EDIT: (A) <<The speed of the solar system due to the galactic rotation is about 220 km/s. The disk of stars in the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across and the sun is located about 30,000 light years from the star's center. Based on a distance of 30,000 light years and a speed of 220 km/s, the Sun's orbit around the center of the Milky Way once every 225 million years. The period of time is called a cosmic year. The Sun has orbited the galaxy, more than 20 times during its 5 billion year lifetime.>> (3rd link)
(B) <<If all stability is due to a gravitional pull of another body, then what body's gravitational fluctuation is responsible for our dipping and rising out of the Milky Way?>>
stability is due to the gravitational effects of everything.
however, on the scale of a planet or less, there is (almost) always a single body whose effects are so much greater than the effects of everything else that generally no other bodies matter.
but on the scale of the galaxy, it's different. if the sun drifts out of the plane of the galaxy, the average gravitational pull of all of the relatively close stars will tend to pull it back.
alternatively, it could be like pluto, and drift back and forth as part of it's galaxial orbit.
there is a very large black hole at the center of the milky way.
for stars close to the center, the black hole is probably, to a great degree, the "important gravitational body".
way out where we are, i would think that the gravity we feel is the average of the black hole, combined with all of the other billions of stars.
All of the motions you mention are controlled by gravity and centripetal force.
As the moon is affected by the Earths gravity and the Earth is affected by the suns gravity,Our solar system is affected by other solar systems gravity fields.As the milky Way Galaxy is affected by other galaxies in the universe.Every thing in this great grand universe affects everything else ether directly or indirectly..good luck
g+o x d/3h=q-u x e=s/ti=o=n.
It sounds like you are asking "why any orbit is stable?" The answer is that orbits are stable because if an orbiting object starts to drop lower then it would go faster which would cause it to rise and vica versa.
Does this help?
The planets revolve around the Sun,the Solar System has a diameter of about 6 billion miles.We are in a galaxy called th Milky Way,filled with 500 billion stars like our sun,bigger or smaller.In the center og the Milky Way is a dark matter zone,they say its a super massive black hole,but its densly packed with stars.The Milky Way has a central gravitational pull and therefore the stars revolve around it,and for our sun to make a full revolution from the point that scientists calculated,we are in right now,it would take 4 billion years.Thats one Sun year as we might call it.
The Andromeda galaxy is said to collide with us in 4 billion years.
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