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When a galaxy or a planetary system forms, its material takes a shape similar to that of a disk. Most of the material orbits and rotates in one direction. This uniformity of motion is due to the collapse of a gas cloud. [1] The nature of the collapse is explained by conservation of angular momentum.
Venus rotates clockwise, and Uranus has been knocked on its side and rotates almost perpendicular to the rest of the Solar System. The ecliptic remains within 3° of the invariable plane over five million years, [ 2 ] but is now inclined about 23.44° to Earth's celestial equator used for the coordinates of poles.
Neptune differs from Uranus in its typical level of meteorological activity. Voyager 2 observed weather phenomena on Neptune during its 1989 flyby, [110] but no comparable phenomena on Uranus during its 1986 flyby. The abundance of methane, ethane and acetylene at Neptune's equator is 10–100 times greater than at the poles. This is ...
This position is halfway, or 6 months, around the ecliptic from the Sun. The planet's height in the sky is opposite that of the Sun's height. The planet is at its highest at the winter solstice, and at its lowest at the summer solstice, on those (rare) occasions when it passes through the center of its retrograde motion near a solstice.
Unaware of Adams's work, he attempted a similar investigation, and on 1 June 1846, in a second memoir presented to a public meeting of the Académie, he gave the position, but not the mass or orbit, of the proposed perturbing body. Le Verrier located Neptune within one degree of its discovery position. [23]
In the normal Euclidean geometry, triangles obey the Pythagorean theorem, which states that the square distance ds 2 between two points in space is the sum of the squares of its perpendicular components = + + where dx, dy and dz represent the infinitesimal differences between the x, y and z coordinates of two points in a Cartesian coordinate ...
The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci. A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time. The square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of the length of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
For gaseous or fluid bodies, such as stars and giant planets, the period of rotation varies from the object's equator to its pole due to a phenomenon called differential rotation. Typically, the stated rotation period for a giant planet (such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) is its internal rotation period, as determined from the rotation ...