How Sci-Fi Shows are wrong.

[stubby]

More of a chess guy myself

[Zupponn]

Well, that went straight into RedRover's pr0n folder.

[RedRover]

Well, that went straight into RedRover's pr0n folder.

[runnybabbit223]

:Back on subject:
What I find weird is that the solar system does act on a 2-d plane (Not accounting for pluto) all the planets are in alignment with each other in one plane. I mean, if you saw that in a sci-fi show you would think that wrong right? ...Right?

[Steel_Valkyrie]

But the universe itself isn't.

[runnybabbit223]

But the universe itself isn't.

Yeah, I know... but still, it doesn't seem right!

[Steel_Valkyrie]

Be more open minded. Imagine more of a ww2 dogfight, except with no up or down.

[The Shadowscythe]

A 2D universe of infinite ass.

[Steel_Valkyrie]

You do like ass, don't you?

[Silverdream]

A 2D universe of infinite ass.

So, a hentai?

[Zupponn]

More stuff for RedRover's pr0n folder.

[Keldoclock]

wow, it really is like a marblecake thread

[stubby]

:Back on subject:
What I find weird is that the solar system does act on a 2-d plane (Not accounting for pluto) all the planets are in alignment with each other in one plane. I mean, if you saw that in a sci-fi show you would think that wrong right? ...Right?

All right so here's how that works. Imagine you've got a big ball of pizza dough. You start spinning it around and around, on any arbitrary axis. Centrifigual force pulls away spinning material as it gets further from the axis; material cohesion pulls everything together regardless of where it is in relation to the axis. The middle flattens out, the ends spread out, and then bam! Delicious pizza.

If you have a giant cloud of interstellar dust, it's like that ball of dough. If it's a perfectly uniform distribution of dust, and there are no outside forces acting on it, then the dust all collapses to the center and becomes a star or a black hole. But the actual universe doesn't work that way; there are always outside forces acting differently on one area than another, and dust clouds aren't uniform. One way or another, things are out of balance, and at least one part of the dust cloud is moving at a different velocity relative to other parts of the dust cloud.

That's all it takes. As long as there's at least some small amount of differential motion in the cloud, then some particles will fall directly to the gravitational center at a less direct angle than the others. Particles moving in different directions gradually pull nearby particles into their trajectories, and over millions or billions of years, all those interactions continually average out and the motion of the system unifies. And then it's the same as the pizza dough: centrifugal force keeps material at right angles to the axis of rotation from falling inward; everything along the axis falls inward. Everything flattens out. (And then individual irregularities within the system do the same thing and spin into systems of their own, which is why planets and planetary systems tend to rotate on the same axis as the solar system they're in, unless acted on by forces from outside the solar system.)

But there is no "up" or "down" until the axis of rotation for the overall system stabilizes. The axis can point in any direction in space at all. Once the overall motion of the system stabilizes, it just flattens around whichever direction the axis is pointing, and that becomes "up" or "down" for that particular system of objects.

[RedRover]

Space pizza, it's outta this world!

[Natalya]

I'm glad to see that I can start drama even when I'm not hanging around.

Anyway, so yeah our solar system pretty much has its objects orbiting in a flat pizza ring like Mike said, with the exception of Pluto, Eris, and the other random garbage that's towards the edge of the system.

Milky Way Galaxy, same thing. It sorta flattened out a number of billions of years ago because the whole thing has an angular momentum and dark matter accelerated the flattening. (It used to be a cloud when the galaxy was very young.)

IIRC the alignment of our solar system's planets and rotation about the sun is in the same general plane as the milkyway itself. I wonder if most other star systems in our galaxy have their planets rotating in a similar plane? It probably breaks down near the galactic core, but f that place anyway, too much radiation.