More stuff is in the pipeline right now, but it may still take a couple of days to come out, so for now I leave you with a video that is not mine (yeah, I can hear the cheers from here, shut up.) Miss Cellania (possibly not her real name) featured a clip from CGP Grey, who we all know and love, about the proximity of the planets in the solar system. No, not the cluster of the “rocky bodies” (Mercury/Venus/Earth/Mars) versus the gas giants (Jupiter/Saturn/Uranus/Neptune,) which is interesting enough – the relative distances between the two classes is huge. Instead, this talks about which is closest to which, for the greatest amount of time. The answer is pretty cool.
Was the answer surprising? It seems kind of obvious in retrospect, at least if you know orbital periods, but the idea of the lineup of mean orbital distances from the sun, the ‘order’ we all know, has always been misleading.
Now, I want to see when, and perhaps how often, the planets have the greatest distance from each other; I’m imagining it happens once every several thousand years or so.
[By the way, while I am never a fan of bloated, monopolistic websites and their manipulative behavior – which is why I host my own videos on Vimeo – using the link I provided under “CGP Grey” above will produce a bunch of related videos that may also be of interest. Just this once.]