Is this sort of orbit even possible?
- Thread starter dwengo
- Start date
Ive run into it quite a few times. its common among gas giant moons.
If he met reality he posted in the wrong area
Check out Lagrangian Points, which are kind of relating to the OP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point
In physics and astronomy, calculating the behavior of three bodies is a hazzle, but there are many three body systems in the Universe. Sol/Earth/Moon to name one.
Generally I've been positively surprised about the physics in ED. It cuts a few corners here and there, like going faster than the speed of light, but as Prot said in the movie K-Pax:
"What Einstein actually said was that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light because its mass would become infinite. Einstein said nothing about entities already traveling at the speed of light or faster."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point
In physics and astronomy, calculating the behavior of three bodies is a hazzle, but there are many three body systems in the Universe. Sol/Earth/Moon to name one.
Generally I've been positively surprised about the physics in ED. It cuts a few corners here and there, like going faster than the speed of light, but as Prot said in the movie K-Pax:
"What Einstein actually said was that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light because its mass would become infinite. Einstein said nothing about entities already traveling at the speed of light or faster."
Gravity (with speed) has a tendency to pull things into an orderly system, kinda like a bike can set itself upright if it has enough velocity and you push it aside. One would think a barycenter outside a body is impossible in the long term, but in reality NONE of the barycentres is in the exact mass centre of any body. They all wobble. The only difference between say Earth-Moon system and the one found is that the mass difference in our system is big enough for the barycentre to stay inside Earth. Makes no difference really, it still dances limbo inside Earth.
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Entirely possible in reality, and quite common in the Forge.
Wikipedia has an article on barycenters, and the gallery has great animated examples. Yours would appear to be this one:
Wikipedia has an article on barycenters, and the gallery has great animated examples. Yours would appear to be this one:
Strictly, the Sun and Jupiter orbit each other like this - with the centre of their orbits *just* above the surface of the Sun.
So in Elite Dangerous terms what you should see is:
Sol (Sol A)
Mercury (Sol A1)
Venus (Sol A2)
Earth (Sol A3)
Mars (Sol A4)
Jupiter (Sol B)
Saturn (Sol AB1)
Uranus (Sol AB2)
Neptune (Sol AB3)
However, Elite Dangerous does not allow the primary star of a system to be in a barycentric arrangement with anything lighter than a Y-class dwarf, even if the mass and distance mean it should be, so Sol is represented in the conventional way.
This is particularly obvious if you find a system containing *only* a large gas giant "orbiting" a small Y-class dwarf star.
So in Elite Dangerous terms what you should see is:
Sol (Sol A)
Mercury (Sol A1)
Venus (Sol A2)
Earth (Sol A3)
Mars (Sol A4)
Jupiter (Sol B)
Saturn (Sol AB1)
Uranus (Sol AB2)
Neptune (Sol AB3)
However, Elite Dangerous does not allow the primary star of a system to be in a barycentric arrangement with anything lighter than a Y-class dwarf, even if the mass and distance mean it should be, so Sol is represented in the conventional way.
This is particularly obvious if you find a system containing *only* a large gas giant "orbiting" a small Y-class dwarf star.
But they don't count because the Sun is not a planet and Jupiter is not a sun.
Anyone ever found a tripple planet?
That's not the distinction Elite Dangerous uses.
You can quite easily get a light star in a barycentre with a planet.
Pictured: two small T-Tauri stars, a 1.6 earth mass HMC, and a gas giant
You just can't get it represented like this if the star is the primary star of the system - so a system with the left T-Tauri and the HMC in exactly the same mutual orbit ... but nothing else - would show them as not barycentric.
Triples are fairly common.
Quadruples are rare (I'd guess about one in 5,000 systems) but if you explore enough you'll find some.
Quintuples exist and there's a screenshot or two around this forum somewhere - but they're incredibly rare.
6-way barycentres are probably possible - it's a big galaxy, after all - but none found yet for planets that I know of. (7-way has been found for stars, possibly higher)
This thread has screenshots of them.
Well, it's possible for planets, but for moons? Not so much. Tidal forces from the planet they're orbiting should cause any double satellites to rapidly spiral into eachother and merge. Maybe if they're very far out (where the tidal forces would be weaker) they might last longer as a pair?
This sort of situation bugs me a lot, since you'd only get the two components orbiting a barycentre outside both bodies if they have similar mass. The T-Tauri in the example you show probably is hundreds (if not thousands) of times more massive than the 1.6 ME HMC though = it seems rather unlikely to me that the barycentre of such a system would be outside both bodies.
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It's probably not very *much* outside the T-Tauri, and they're probably in quite a wide orbital situation, though as I was just hopping through the system on the way, I didn't fly out to take a closer look.
If the T-Tauri is 1000 times heavier than the HMC, but the HMC orbits at >1000 times the T-Tauri's radius, then the barycentre will be outside the surface of the star.
Same as the Sun-Jupiter situation - the Sun is 1000 times heavier, but Jupiter orbits at slightly over 1000 times its radius.
Deleted member 166264
D
I ran into a pair of planets that looked like this in the FSS:
In the system map they look like this:
In the system map they look like this: