
04-December-2007, 01:37 PM
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Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: The Maritimes
Posts: 10,188
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On one of the web sites attached to this message board, Phil "BA" Plait computed the gravitational effect of every planet (including Pluto) being in perfect alignment with the Earth.
Here.
It's a good article, but here's the most relevant parts:
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Originally Posted by On Gravity
Let's look at gravity first. Right away you can see that even mighty Jupiter, king of the planets, only pulls about 0.01 (= 1%) as hard as the Moon does (just to show how I did this, Jupiter masses 27,000 times the Moon, but is 1640 times farther away. The square of 1640 is about 2.7 million, and 27,000/2.7 million=0.01). Venus is next, with only 0.6 % of the Moon's force. After that, the numbers drop a lot. The total pull of all the planets combined is 0.017, not even 2% of the Moon's pull!
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Originally Posted by On the moon's elliptical orbit
If you use these numbers like we did above, you see that the Moon's own gravitational effect on the Earth fluctuates by about 25% every orbit! The Moon orbits the Earth in about a month, incidentally, so it goes from apogee to perigee every two weeks. So every 14 days we see a change in gravitational effects from the Moon more than 10 times greater than all the other planets combined!
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Originally Posted by On tidal forces
Venus stretches us the most of the planets, simply because it is the closest on average. But look! Even Venus only stretches us 5 hundred thousandths as much as the Moon does! This is completely negligible, and the other planets have even less effect.
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Originally Posted by On the 2000 alignment itself
It's worth mentioning that the "alignment" in 2000 has all the planets on the far side of the Sun. This means that you can add 300 million kilometers to the above distances, and I think you can see that the numbers will drop even more. For example, Jupiter's gravity drops from 0.02 to 0.005, and Venus' tides drop by a factor of 500!
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With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
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