Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to i said there would be a doozie somewhere around the full moon this month

"This was the only time ALL year that the full moon conjuncted Jupiter....pull out your ephemeris." - You know, sometimes think that someone as stupid as you has to work hard at it...

Let me guess you fell for the 'harmonic convergence' and all the other "alignment of the planets will mean doom" crap.

Lets ignore that you are yet again exploiting YET ANOTHER human tragedy (Like when you posted that garbage after the tsunami claiming that the quake was a religious conspiracy)...

Look at the FACTS:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planets.html

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!

That ain't much. But is it enough to destroy the Earth?

No, it isn't. Think of it this way: the Moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse, which means that sometimes in its orbit it is closer to the Earth than others. At perigee, or closest approach, it is about 363,000 kilometers away, and at apogee, or farthest point, it is about 405,000 kilometers away. 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!


But those facts wont stop you from posting pseudoscientific bullshit here, will they?

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