Wednesday 23 December 2015

newtonian gravity - Why do all the planets of the solar system orbit in roughly the same 2D plane?




  1. Most images you see of the solar system are 2D and all planets orbit in the same plane. In a 3D view, are really all planets orbiting in similar planes? Is there a reason for this? I'd expect that the orbits distributed all around the sun, in 3D.





  2. Has an object made by man (a probe) ever left the Solar System?





Answer



Nic and Approximist's answers hit the main points, but it's worth adding an additional word on the reason the orbits lie roughly in the same plane: Conservation of angular momentum.


The Solar System began as a large cloud of stuff, many times larger than its current size. It had some very slight initial angular momentum -- that is, it was, on average, rotating about a certain axis. (Why? Maybe just randomly! All of the constituents were flying around, and if you add up those random motions, there'll generically be some nonzero angular momentum.) Because angular momentum is conserved, as the cloud collapsed the rotation rate sped up (the usual example being the figure skater who pulls in her arms as she spins, and speeds up accordingly).


Further collapse in the direction perpendicular to the plane of rotation doesn't change the angular momentum, but collapse in the other directions would change it. So the collapse turns the initial cloud, whatever its shape, into a pancake. The planets formed out of that pancake.


By the way, you can see the signs of that initial angular momentum in other things too: not only are all of the planets orbiting in roughly the same plane, but so are most of their moons, and most of the planets' rotations about their axes as well.


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