alba wrote:
OK here's my rant with a few questions relating to our solar system..
Why do 9 planets rotate around our star? Does it have anything to do with curved space/time? Any of you experts on the nature of space/time?...Can anyone explain why space/time is curved? And how that curviture sort of regulates the orbits of 9 planets around our star? And how that relates to gravity?? And how Pluto stays in orbit when it is so far away from our star? Doesn't that ever boggle your mind? And the forces involved would logically be extraordinarily powerful..? And just might affect how we experience space/time? Because we're an integral part of this SOLAR SYSTEM...and whatever is going on with this solar system is going on with us.
It is 8 planets. Pluto is now classified as a Kuyper Body, not a planet. There are tens of thousands of bodies revolving about the sun. They assume approximately elliptical orbits (somewhat perturbed by mutual gravitation) because in a four dimension manifold given the ground metric of the space the orbits are the geodesics, i.e. shortest space-time distances.
Of the four known forces, gravitation is the weakest.
ruveyn