Quote:
Originally Posted by mugaliens
Actually, all our planetary orbits are fairly locked in position due to the gravitational interaction between the planets. If one planet's orbit changes, the others will, too, to compensate and restabilize. It takes time, but generally speaking, all of us, including Pluto and a few of it's sisters, are locked into our orbits with one another.
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We're not though. Sure, the semimajor axes of planetary orbits hardly change at all because tidal forces are generally so small and there's no drag anymore... but it'd be false to say that we're
locked. An orbit only "locked" if it's in a strong resonance (e.g. 2:1, 3:2), and not all planets are in resonances with eachother.