Posted on 05/28/2011 4:43:54 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Call me back when the aliens land.
If the gas giant was several times more massive than Jupiter then the Earth like planet would zoom around it close to what we have now. You'd might have a longer day & night but it shouldn't be that bad.
Now if the Gas Giant was about the same size as Jupiter, day and night might last a week or two each. That would be extreme as you would essentially go through all four seasons in one day. Spring in the morning, summer in the afternoon, fall in the evening and winter at night.
And that's only if the gas giant and the earth like planet are like Jupiter and have a insignificant axis tilt, if the gas giant and/or the earth like planet was tilted like earth you'd get seasons within seasons, 4 yearly seasons to go with your 4 daily seasons.
That movie is Copyright Antonio Cidadao. The USNO uses it by permission, we should at least acknowledge the source. Dr. Cidadao is a physician who practices backyard astronomy from the balcony of his Lisbon apartment. The movie was made during March and April 1998.
God is smart!
I've seen recent estimates that there were several Mars sized bodies in the early Solar System, so a collision may not be as improbable as once thought. The bottom line is that it is better for the evolution of higher life to a have a moon.
I'd like to see her tell that to all the so called scientists trying to stir up massive panic over relatively minor and mostly naturally caused climate change.
Thanks Lonesome in Massachussets.
More Moons Around Earth? It's Not So LoonyEarth has a second moon, of sorts, and could have many others. Cruithne, the 3-mile-wide (5-km) satellite, takes 770 years to complete a horseshoe-shaped orbit around Earth, and will remain in a suspended state around Earth for at least 5,000 years. Every 385 years, it comes to its closest point to Earth, some 9.3 million miles (15 million kilometers) away. Its next close approach to Earth comes in 2285. "We found new dynamical channels through which free asteroids become temporarily moons of Earth and stay there from a few thousand years to several tens of thousands of years," said Fathi Namouni, one of the researchers, now at Princeton University. Namouni's colleague Apostolos Christou said, "At specific points in its orbit, it reverses its rate of motion with respect to Earth so it will appear to go back and forth." In his view, there are three classes of moons -- large moons in near-circular orbits around a planet, having formed soon after the planet; smaller fragments that are the products of collisions; and outer, irregular moons in odd orbits, or captured asteroids like Cruithne. In the past year, astronomers have reported finding such objects around Uranus.
by Robin Lloyd
October 29 1999
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