How do the planets in our solar system orbit the sun?
Question:
all the pictures of the solar system show the planets travelling on parralell routes all along the same angle from the sun...
can anyone find a picture of the planets in a 3d environment please?
Answer:
You ever seen a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline? Where it makes the indention at its heaviest point? Do that sometime and then roll a marble around it and watch what happens.
The Sun works somewhat like that bowling ball would, with the trampoline surface representing the fabric of space (not 3 dimentional of course). Granted that marble would roll towards the bowling ball on Earth eventually because of gravity, space is a vacuum and nothing would "pull" the planet down. So it continues to move at the constant speed that keeps it in orbit. Since the Sun exerts a massive amount of gravity, and since the planets have a sideways motion, they continue orbiting accordingly.
I don't know where parallel comes from. that is a property of straight lines.They certainly don't do that. The planets are in nearly circular orbits all in the same plane. So you can draw the orbits on paper, you don't need to go to 3D.
There's a cool free download that can paint this picture for you...
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/...
Gravitational pull from the Sun.
the planets orbit the sun because the sun's gravity holds it in place. the sun's gravitational pull is so great, all of the asteroid belts, planets, moons, or other space junk is held within it.
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