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Shahin.Omar
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Why revolving bodies have their orbits elliptical and not perfectly circular (please correct me if I am wrong)?
Is there anything in nature that is perfectly circular? Perfect circles exist in math only.Shahin.Omar said:Why revolving bodies have their orbits elliptical and not perfectly circular (please correct me if I am wrong)?
Vanadium 50 said:Because ellipses (technically, conic sections) are the trajectories of particles in a 1/r potential. If gravity had a different relation of force vs. distance, there would be different shaped orbits.
They don't have one orbit, just individual orbits which are not perfect circles. The average of the individual orbit is closer to the circle but not a perfect circle either.Shahin.Omar said:Saturn's rings are a set of large number of bodies and they together form a perfect circular orbit.
A.T. said:They don't have one orbit, just individual orbits which are not perfect circles. The average of the individual orbit is closer to the circle but not a perfect circle either.
Planets have elliptical orbits because of the influence of gravity. According to Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, all objects with mass have a gravitational pull on each other. In the case of planets, the strong gravitational pull of the much larger sun causes them to follow an elliptical path around it.
The shape of an orbit is primarily affected by the mass of the objects involved and the distance between them. The larger the mass of the central object, the more elliptical the orbit will be. Similarly, the closer the objects are to each other, the more circular the orbit will be.
Elliptical orbits differ from circular orbits in terms of their shape. While a circular orbit has a constant distance from the central object, an elliptical orbit has varying distances. This means that a planet in an elliptical orbit will sometimes be closer to the central object and other times farther away.
Yes, an object can have a perfectly circular orbit. This occurs when the force of gravity from the central object is balanced by the centrifugal force of the orbiting object. In this case, the orbiting object maintains a constant distance from the central object.
Scientists measure the shape of an orbit using a measurement called eccentricity. Eccentricity is a number between 0 and 1 that represents the shape of an ellipse. A value of 0 represents a perfect circle, while a value closer to 1 represents a more elongated ellipse. This measurement can be calculated using the distance between the objects and their masses.