RE: When plants align
March 13, 2015 at 4:39 am
(This post was last modified: March 13, 2015 at 4:54 am by Smaug.)
(March 12, 2015 at 9:41 pm)Void Wrote: This is just an absurd question, but I kind of thought it was funny, so I'm just gonna pop it.
I was thinking that in a world with infinite posibilities, there would be a chance that one religion actually was right. I kind of thought the odds of that would be about the same as having all the plants in the solar system line up in one straight line on one side of the sun.
The question is, will that ever happen, or have happened in the past? And if it is possible, how would that affect the physics of the sun and the solar system?
When two or more orbiting bodies align in line on the same side of a central body it's called conjunction. When two orbiting bodies are in conjunction their mutual gravitational attraction is the strongest of all other orbital configurations. Conjunctions play a major role in so-called orbital resonances. A resonance occurs when the periods of two or more orbiting bodies relate as small natural numbers. Resonant configurations lead to regular variations of gravitational interaction between the orbiting bodies which in turn leads to periodic and/or secular variations of the bodies' orbits. The variations are ralatively small but on a long run they may result in either stabilzation of orbits or in ejections or collisions of celestial bodies.
Speaking of aligned plants... it's a good point for the astrologists that eight plants aligned in line and placed not far from them affect them stronger (via gravitational pull) that eight planets aligned in a conjunction.
A conjunction of all the planets is possible though by definition it's an extremely rare ocasion. I don't know by heart whether such a thing has ever taken place or what is the period and don't bother to look it up right now. Speaking of it's effect on the Solar system, the effect is extremely minor even on a relatively long run due to the rarity of such conjunctions .
