Orbital Motions of our Solar System

member 157595

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If anyone reading this thread is wondering why the orbital motion shown in the videos appears to be unpredictable and non-repeating, there are reasons for that. A big one is that the equations of state that relate gravity with orbital motion cannot be analytically solved when more than 2 objects are considered. This is known as the 3-body problem. The physics can be numerically approximated/modeled but the equations cannot be explicitly solved and are chaotic, meaning the results are extraordinarily sensitive to initial conditions in an unpredictable way. I read somewhere once there is technically a time series "solution" that isn't usable because the series doesn't converge in an even remotely usable way but I could be wrong on that.

Newtonian gravity is in itself an approximation of GR (where shit gets insanely complicated), and since "gravity" has an infinite range you technically are considering a problem with...let's just say a lot of objects. Realistically you can neglect almost everything due to distance and/or mass, but still.
 

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