I was linked this video from a friend, which shows an animation of the sun moving through space, with the planets pulled along in a vortex along with it.
My question is, is it accurate? I know the planets largely share the same ‘plane’ of orbit, but is that plane perpendicular to the sun’s own motion?
Weird, I wondered the same thing when I watched that. Imagine how complicated the trails would be if it’s moving at some acute angle to the ecliptic.
The plane of the solar system (“disc”) is about 60 degrees tilted from the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. And most of the Sun’s motion is within the plane of the Milky Way (other than any motion by the galaxy traveling in relation to other galaxies).
No, it’s not, and that video goes further than changing the tilt to 90 degrees. If you pay attention to the text and then examine the animation, it claims the planets are always trailing the sun. It’s part of a larger nonsense crackpot theory.
IIRC we are moving towards Vega.
OMFG, so we’re *SIDEWAYS, *not up-and-down :eek: !!! And the sun’s not in the middle, but careening out of control ahead of us :eek: ! And the planets are all just lagging behind??? What if another planet crashes into us :eek: ? What if the sun goes too fast and loses us :eek: ? We’ll just be floating around in the dark and cold!!! OMFG :eek: !!!
And if one of those things do go wrong, would you trust these younger generations to be able to fix it? Heck no, I wouldn’t. We’d be doomed.
The video may not accurately represent the motion of the solar system accounting for the sun’s orbiting the galactic centre, but based on the oscillations the Bad Astronomer talks about in that article, along with the 60 degree incline, the motion of the planets must be pretty cool, yes?
And what moves towards Vega stays in Vega.
Personally, I’ prefer to believe that the Milky Way is tilted 60º to the Solar System–but I’m heliocentric (or should that be solarsystemcentric?).
It’s a shame it doesn’t, given how cool it does look. I did wonder about the “vortex is life” stuff that appeared at the end of the video, though.
Does anyone know of an animation that shows the actual movement, as the sun goes along?
Mysticism. What a great effort, wasted on garbage.
It would be great to see a video made as well, based on physics and astronomy rather than mysticism.
Celestia, a celestial simulator, might be of help here. Just fly out to a good vantage point and set the time to go at the right speed, and you’d think it would give you a good idea of what it would really look like.
The “bad video” isn’t just wrong in how the planets move, it’s also wrong in the scale it’s showing things. If you want an animation of the real motion you have to make some choices. Do you want to show Mercury, which has an orbital speed two orders of magnitude faster than the Sun’s galactic orbital speed? Or do you want to show Neptune, which moves two orders of magnitude slower, relative to the Sun’s speed?
Oh, you want all those eight varying spirals at once, even though Mercury’s will just look like a solid tube? Well how wide a tube do you want? Cause Neptune’s Spiral will need to be 60 times as wide if you want it in scale.
Shouldn’t be too hard to model each spiral as a 3D graph though, kinda want to do that now …