An Exploration Of Planetary Orbital Geometry (part 2)
Many appreciate the sun has an impact on climate but what about the planets? In this article I fashion a tin foil hat and peek at the gas giants
In part 1 of this series we discovered how we can turn planetary orbits into time series data and I used the orbital parameters of Mars and Earth to bake a few example slides. I don’t want to leave dwarf planets out of this recipe so I need to throw Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris into the pot to make 13 heavenly bodies floating in the rapture of Sol. Out of these Eris has got the longest journey home taking 557.2 years for one complete revolution according to this handy table offered by a bod at Princeton. Now 557.2 years is a long time in politics, generating 203,520.6 days and 29,074.4 months. It would take my quad core workstation rather a long time to plot out slides containing upwards of 29k data points let alone 200k so I’m going to need some tricks up my sleeve.
The first trick is to focus on small periods of time, as with Mars and Earth in part 1. This is fine for heavenly bodies from Ceres to Mercury whose orbits range from 4.59984 down to 0.2408467 years but this doesn’t work that well for the gas giants. Jupiter, being the closest gas giant to the sun, has an orbital period of 11.862615 years that will generate a manageable 4,332.7 days and 142.4 months but mystical Neptune, with an orbital period of 164.79132 years, will generate 60,188.8 days and 1,977.5 months. My oven can manage 2k months but not 60k days so I need to dial-in the second trick and that is to average the daily data over months.
Let’s take a look at an example for the four gas giants whilst the iron is still hot…