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In Mercury's case, the planet completes three rotations for every two revolutions around the Sun, a 3:2 spin–orbit resonance. In the special case where an orbit is nearly circular and the body's rotation axis is not significantly tilted, such as the Moon, tidal locking results in the same hemisphere of the revolving object constantly facing ...
The red planet is stationary; the force F(r) is balanced by a repulsive inverse-cube force. A GIF version of this animation is found here. Figure 2: The radius r of the green and blue planets are the same, but their angular speed differs by a factor k. Examples of such orbits are shown in Figures 1 and 3–5.
Earth's rotation or Earth's spin is the rotation of planet Earth around its own axis, as well as changes in the orientation of the rotation axis in space. Earth rotates eastward , in prograde motion .
The last few giant impacts during planetary formation tend to be the main determiner of a terrestrial planet's rotation rate. On average the spin angular velocity will be about 70% of the velocity that would cause the planet to break up and fly apart; the natural outcome of planetary embryo impacts at speeds slightly larger than escape velocity.
This causes the orientation of the Earth's axis to vary over the same period, with the true position of the celestial poles describing a small ellipse around their mean position. The maximum radius of this ellipse is the constant of nutation, approximately 9.2 arcseconds. Smaller effects also contribute to nutation.
Stars and planets rotate in the first place because conservation of angular momentum turns random drifting of parts of the molecular cloud that they form from into rotating motion as they coalesce. Given this average rotation of the whole body, internal differential rotation is caused by convection in stars which is a movement of mass, due to ...
Atmospheric super-rotation is a phenomenon where a planet's atmosphere rotates faster than the planet itself. This behavior is observed in the atmospheres of Venus , Titan , Jupiter , and Saturn. Venus exhibits the most extreme super-rotation, with its atmosphere circling the planet in four Earth days, much faster than the planet's own rotation ...
In astronomy, perturbation is the complex motion of a massive body subjected to forces other than the gravitational attraction of a single other massive body. [1] The other forces can include a third (fourth, fifth, etc.) body, resistance, as from an atmosphere, and the off-center attraction of an oblate or otherwise misshapen body.