Ellipses and their foci have a lot of useful properties. It so happens that an orbiting object traces out an ellipse, with the thing it orbits around at one of the focuses. Coincidence? Yes. I can’t find a good intuitive reason why orbits are elliptical. In fact, I...
When things are in highly elliptical orbits they tend to “drive all over the road” and smack into things. When things smack into each other one of a few things happen; generally they break or they don’t. When we look at our planetary neighbors we see...
Doubleneutron star(DNS) systems in tight orbits are fantastic laboratories to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The first such DNS system, commonly known as Hulse-Taylor binarypulsar, provided the first indirect evidence of the existence ofgravitational wavesand the impetus to buildLIGO....
Why are planets and moons sphere-shaped? Why is the Oort cloud theoretical? Why was Kepler able to deduce the elliptical orbits of planets from Tycho's data, while so many other earlier astronomers and learned men had missed it? Why will Polaris not always be the North Star?
This is why observable space is solely 3-dimensional. Both a novel Virial theorem analysis, and detailed classical and quantum energy calculations for 3-space circular and elliptical orbits indicate that they have no orbital binding energy in greater than 3-space. The same energy equation also ...
The revolution of the Earth and other planets around the sun may be treated as circular for simplicity, but planetary orbits are actually elliptical (slightly oval) and therefore not an example of rotational motion. An object can be rotating while also experiencing linear motion; just consider a...
Why are metals shiny? Why do metal poor stars have the most elliptical orbits? From where do they obtain their metals? Why are the metals gold and silver found as elements in nature, whereas the metals sodium and magnesium are found in nature only in compounds?
The Moon's average distance from Earth (one "Lunar Distance") is 384,400 km. During each of its elliptical orbits, though, the Moon spends roughly half of the time a little closer to us than that, and the rest of the time a little bit farther away. ...
Over time, that scattering from circular to slightly elliptical orbits produces the smooth fade in brightness from the center of a galaxy to its edge. We’re talking a lot of time: “This process takes a few hundred million years to a few billion years,” Struck said. ...
Furthermore, he explained the differences in stability of levels with the same principal quantum number, n, in terms of the ability of the highly elliptical orbits to bring the electron closer to the nucleus (Figure 7-15). For a point nucleus of charge +1 in hydrogen, the energies of ...