Granted, but the Sun-Earth Moon triangle isn't static. Things get complicated when one of those points is orbiting another in such a way as to cause its apparent position as seen from the third point to be above or below the second.
If the system formed a stable planar triangle, we would get solar and lunar eclipses every alternate fortnight.
The "How many Earths?" piece has an excellent illustration of this, in the slide about Kepler only being able to detect planets via the luminosity method when the planet passes in front of its star. If its orbit is outside the plane of this line of sight, this method won't see the planet.
If the system formed a stable planar triangle, we would get solar and lunar eclipses every alternate fortnight.
The "How many Earths?" piece has an excellent illustration of this, in the slide about Kepler only being able to detect planets via the luminosity method when the planet passes in front of its star. If its orbit is outside the plane of this line of sight, this method won't see the planet.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
