The solar-system tag has no wiki summary.
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Solar System Capture of Orphan Planets
NASA recently announced (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/planet20110518.html) that orphan planets, planets no longer orbiting a star, may be more numerous than the stars in our galaxy. ...
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Why all rocks are not orbiting bigger rocks in space?
Why only big rocks (planets) have satellites and not small ones? Why cosmic dust doesn't orbit rocks that are many times heavier than the dust grains? If dust is still too heavy then what about ...
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Question on the stability of the solar system
One of the pertinent questions about many body systems that causes me much wonder is why the solar system is so stable for billions of years. I came across the idea of "resonance" and albeit an useful ...
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Questions about the Solar System
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 ...
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If the Sun were to suddenly become a black hole of the same mass, what would the orbital periods of the planets be?
I am interested in theoretical and practical considerations.
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Does the long axis of Earth's orbit precess? Does it nutate?
Get up off the plane of the ecliptic by a couple of million miles. Look back at the Sun and watch the Earth's orbit in time-lapse for a few centuries. The orbit is an ellipse tilted at 23.5 degrees ...
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Why are Saturn's rings so thin?
Take a look at this picture (from APOD http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110308.html):
I presume that rocks within rings smash each other. Below the picture there is a note which says that Saturn's rings ...
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Why were space physicists wrong about the location of the heliopause?
The heliopause is now estimated to be something around 100 AU (1 AU = Astronomical unit = about the earth sun distance). See the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere
From ...
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Why are the orbits of planets in the Solar System nearly circular?
Except for Mercury, the planets in the Solar System have very small eccentricities.
Is this property special to the Solar System? Wikipedia states:
Most exoplanets with orbital periods of 20 ...
