CLEVELAND — With so much focus on the total solar eclipse right now, I thought some stellar solar system facts would shake up your universe.
Let me take you back to grade school and the solar system diagram. Can’t you picture it? All of our planets, (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune), circling around our beautiful sunshine, right?
Wrong!
Jupiter does not orbit around the sun. It is so big, so massive, that it orbits a different center of gravity or barycenter, than all the other planets in our solar system.
Let me stop right there and just talk about this giant, intriguing planet for a moment. Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun, and the biggest planet in our solar system.
How big? Some 1300 Earths could fit inside Jupiter! Jupiter’s mass is two-and-a-half times of all the other planets in our solar system combined!
And we can’t forget about Jupiter’s well-known red spot. The great red spot that has become the planet's signature. It’s a storm bigger than our Earth that has been raging for years.
Impressed yet?
Ok, now let’s get back to this orbit stuff. When you think of our solar system, the sun takes center stage, with all the planets orbiting around it. Can’t you see the science fair project you did with the hanger and the planets on strings circling around the sun?
Jupiter does not behave the same, defying this conventional pattern because of its enormity.
According to an article in HOW STUFF WORKS by Christopher Hassiotis, Jupiter is so, so big itself, it has no ties with the barycenter of the sun that is buried within the sun.
You see all the other planets orbit around the sun, which in itself has a barycenter deep within it.
However, Jupiter does not have ties with the barycenter of the sun. What happens with Jupiter is that it orbits a spot in empty space between it and the sun, another barycenter -- not the barycenter deep within the sun that all the other planets in our solar system orbit. All the other planets are so much smaller in comparison, they essentially orbit the barycenter deep within the sun. Nothing cancels it out. They just orbit around the sun, being drawn to the barycenter buried far within the center of the sun.
To make this even more interesting the sun also orbits the same barycenter as Jupiter, it’s a combined center of gravity where their two gravities “even out”.
This makes our sun wobble a little bit, as astronomers look at it when doing research.
This wobble is key for astronomers looking for massive planets orbiting other stars, like Jupiter in our solar system. If they see stars wobble in our universe, they can assume a planet as big as Jupiter is also out there somewhere else in the universe, too.