|
|
New Planets and New Adventures in Space
By Laura Knoy on Tuesday, February 21, 2006.
A possible new planet beyond Pluto in our solar system, the prospects of more “earthlike†planets beyond our galaxy, comet dust captured and brought back to Earth and a new space craft set out to explore farther then we ever have before. Today on the exchange, we’ll look at all the out of this world happenings going on right now beyond the stratosphere. Laura’s guests are Mal Cameron, coordinator of theNASA Educator Resource Center at the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium, and John Gianforte, Astronomy instructor for the University System of New Hampshire's Granite State College, Co-founder of the Astronomical Society of Northern New England and monthly astronomy columnist for Fosters Daily Democrat.
|
Support FromHighlightsNavigationUser login | ||||
This is probably nerdy nit-picking, but I'd like to add a bit to your guests' answer to a question involving the motion of Pluto and its satellite Charon. It was correctly stated that those two bodies revolve around a point somewhere between them ("square dancing"), and that the same kinds of forces that keep one side of Charon always facing Pluto also cause Earth's moon to always present just one face to Earth. Your guests neglected to mention, however, that Earth and its moon also perform the same kind of dance around a point between them; indeed, this is true of all systems consisting of two bodies – they move around their center of gravity. The difference between Pluto/Charon and Earth/Moon is that the center of gravity of the latter system actually lies inside the Earth, because it is so much heavier than the Moon. Nevertheless, we and the Moon do swing each other around. It is the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system that moves in a nice (almost) circular orbit around the sun; the center of the Earth moves in a squiggle back and forth on either side of that orbit, as it dances with the Moon.