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To: RadioAstronomer
If you notice only two planets have a high eccentricity; Mercury and Pluto.

And they all have elliptical orbits, even Earth. The statement by Junior "nearly circular" was quite wrong and by your numbers the orbits of a few of the others, while not crossing with other planets are also quite far from a circle.

502 posted on 04/06/2002 4:50:11 AM PST by gore3000
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To: gore3000
quite far from a circle.

Question:

If you drew the orbits of the first four planets on a standard, letter sized piece of paper with a sharp pencil and a circle-drawing compass -- would the true orbits lie within the width of the pencil line -- or fall outside the line width?

506 posted on 04/06/2002 5:14:07 AM PST by js1138
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To: gore3000
Go back and look at my post again. A planetary orbit that IS a perfect circle is also an ellipse. Just with e = 0.

The eccentricity of our planet's orbit is mild; aphelion and perihelion differ from the mean Sun-Earth distance by less than 2%. In fact, if you drew Earth's orbit on a sheet of paper it would be difficult to distinguish from a perfect circle and that is with e = 0.0167.

The last statement from my post #486

519 posted on 04/06/2002 5:51:10 AM PST by RadioAstronomer
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