Posted on 12/28/2013 5:00:34 PM PST by kjam22
It has been revealed by the British astronomer Patrick Moore that, on the morning of January 4th 2014, an extraordinary astronomical event will occur. At exactly 9:47 am, the planet Pluto will pass directly behind Jupiter, in relation to the Earth. This rare alignment will mean that the combined gravitational force of the two planets would exert a stronger tidal pull, temporarily counteracting the Earth’s own gravity and making people weigh less. Moore calls this the Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect.
Astronomers have long been aware that there would be an alignment of the planets on that date, when Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto would be on the same side of the Sun, within an arc 95 degrees wide. But now the effect could be expected as the gravitational effect of the other planets on the Earth’s crust is maximum even at their closest approach.
If you think you will be able to float around your house then you will be mistaken. BUT if you jump in the air at 9:47AM local time on January 4th 2014, it should take you about 3 seconds to land back on your feet instead of the usual 0.2 seconds.
(Excerpt) Read more at news-hound.net ...
Find something solid and hang on tight to it!
Still??? I thought he was Roger Moore’s brother. Double 0 8.
Jupiter is in Gemini, Pluto is on the opposite side of the sun in Sagittarius.
There is no such alignment
I guess we had a lunar eclipse last night/ early this morning? I didn’t get up to see it...
. If everyone on earth jumps in the air at the same time.... the earth turns a semi-turn faster at that moment.
Doubt it.
Someone naturally speculated what the actual effect of even more distant Pluto would be. The answer is that it is about 20 million times weaker still.
The speculation in this article -- while wildly wrong -- does not involve tidal forces.
The tidal force is not a differential adjustment in the gravitational effect on nearby points, which is almost always negligible. [It goes as -2dr/r. For the moon, the effect on points separated by 1m is 2 parts in 300,000,000. This is not even detectable. So slightly displaced doesn't cut it.]
The tidal effect arises because for bodies of large spatial extent, there are measurable differences between the gravitational attraction on opposite (or even widely separated) parts of the object. For the moon, the maximum effect is around 6/300. At 2% it is not negligible, but the most dramatic effect is observed at 12,000 Km apart. That's not slight displacement, even when considering LD as a unit of measure.
Heh... and there will be people who will swear it happened.
The closest Jupiter ever gets to us is 6 times further than the sun. The closest pluto ever gets is about 70 times further than the sun.
We have no idea what causes Gravity
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This has been a fun thread to read. Your comment reminded me of something.
In 1968, my employer sent me to the university in Iowa City IA for a two week seminar on statistics. At the entrance to the student union bldg. there was a very large chalk board where students were allowed to write pithy statements.
One such comment was, “There is no such thing as gravity! The Earth sucks!”
The immeasurable part is acceptable.
The theory part is that no rotational kinetic energy is lost in the ‘everybody jumps up at the same time’ scenario.
If any measurable floating effect were going to happen at alignment, we would see a very significant amount of it happening already, slowly building toward this fabulous 3 second float, which would slowly trail off as the planets move out of alignment.
Oh dear, what are we going to do about it?
The moment of inertia of the system composed of the Earth and jumping people will change. In order to conserve angular momentum -- which must be conserved because there is no external torque -- the angular velocity, ω, must decrease. [In your alternative formulation, there are no external sources of energy, therefore the angular velocity must decrease when I increases in order for the kinetic energy to remain constant: Iiωi2 = Ifωf2]
The differential dI would (at most, assuming the people ball themselves up into spheres when they jump) would be 2m * r * dr, where r is the radius of the earth, dr is the number of meters they jump, and m is the mass of six billion people. The number is insignificant compared to the moment of inertia of the Earth, which is roughly 2/5 M r2, where M is the mass of the Earth. And it is clearly this which dominates.
What does this mean?
It means the effect, however large it is would already be seen. It doesn't just magically "turn on" like a light switch when the planets align and then instantly "turn off" when the planets are no longer aligned. It would build continuously toward a maximum, just like the length of the day does, and then fall off slowly once the planets are no longer aligned.
Whatever "magic float effect" there might be would already be well underway -- if it existed.
But it doesn't.
The "-2" in -2dr/r is the -2 in the tidal tensor and represents the stretching effect along the axis of attraction, as represented by the first order term of the power series expansion.
The displacement is considered "slight" in the sense that the first order term is much larger than higher order terms.
Also, whether one uses higher order terms or not, the whole treatment is of a differential force.
The speculation in this article -- while wildly wrong -- does not involve tidal forces.
It says, " This rare alignment will mean that the combined gravitational force of the two planets would exert a stronger tidal pull, ..." Sheesh!
It only too 80+ post for someone to point out that the problem isn’t the gravity, but that they are in opposite parts of the sky on Jan 4th.
Got to be a record.
Weight loss in 2014!
Diet is ovah.
I think even a tenth of a second is total BS. More like .00000000001 seconds.
There are no tidal forces involved in the phenomenon described.
The article clearly says if you jump you will take longer to come down; that isn't a tidal effect. A tidal effect would be that the wrinkles on your face form more slowly than the wrinkles on your toes, or that water splashed into the air will form slightly more elongated bubbles during this alignment. [AND ... Neither of these things happens because even with planetary sized bodies tidal effects are, within experimental error, entirely first order effects.]
The -2 in the -2dr/r is not a tensor. The expression is just the differential: d(2Gm1m2/r2) Unless you're claiming that scalars are tensors. OK, they are. But no actual physicist calls a scalar a tensor. As a matter of fact the first order term in the expansion is a vector, and it points radially, and again, nobody but the prissiest mathematician on the planet actually calls a vector a first order tensor.
In any event, you are simply wrong. This article talks about a "tidal" effect to give it an air of authority, but the effect described is not the least bit tidal. It's simply a gravitational effect, and about 15 orders of magnitude smaller than claimed.
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