Planetary alignment

[howiejmidlands]

There is one question i have regarding planetary alignment. <br />What is it?<br />In books, they show the planets aligned on a single plane around the sun, are they? Or are they like the imaginary orbits of electrons around an atom?<br />If they are aligned in a single plane, as shown in books, why??<br />I would love to know the answer, but i think i may have an inkling.<br /><br />CHeers

 

[MeteorWayne]

Yes, the solar system is very flat.<br />98% of the mass of the solar system other than the sun orbits within about about a 3 degree flat plane. The exceptions are Mercury, (~7 degrees) and everything in the asteroid belt, Trans Neptunian objects (inluding Pluto and Kuiper Belt Objects) and the Oort cloud.<br />The average of all of them is close to the plane, but the mass is so small it's almost irrelevant.<br /><br />The WHY? It has to do with how a gas cloud contracts. Because of conservation of momentum, a rotating cloud will tend to contract into a disk. The planets all formed from that flat disk. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>