Requiem for Relativity

Stoat,

Sounds interesting. My memory of the numbers Tom worked out is not always perfect (I'm now in the process of re-reading the things he has written on EPH), so it is good that you did your own homework. and experimenting is always going to be needed.

Does this simulator allow for any script-based control of the sim?
If not, perhaps there are other simulators that do?

And, when you have more to report, please do so in the new forum for the EPH?

LB

Hi Joe, I was looking at these today and thought yo might find them useful. The Kozai ones in particular. They're java little applets that save a lot of work. orbitsimulator.com/formulas/

I'd better elaborate on that last post about the Kozai effect. Let's suppose that the Moon was at about ninety degrees to the Earth, so it's in a polar eccentric orbit. The Kozai effect states that it can trade off its eccentricity for an equatorial circular orbit. This is a conserved effect rather like angular momentum is conserved. We need a third mass body, and in this case it would be the Sun.

Now let's jump to any number of exoplanetary systems, and the one to google is Kepler 11. Here we have massive gas giants very close in to their primary, and the Kozai effect is the favourite theory to explain the hows and whys of it. That would mean a hidden mass object, such as Joe's brown dwarf, or galactic centre. In the case of Kepler 11 that hidden object must be at a high angle to the ecliptic of the star, so that the planets have pulled in and gone into a near circular polar orbit. This has to have been a rather fast process as the planets haven't had time to boil of their atmospheres.

Ball park figure for the effect of Joe's planet on the Earth, due to the Kozai effect. The cycle will take about a hundred million year to go from maxima to minima. So the orbit could go from a perfect circle to an ellipse of some eccentricity (not worked out yet as I don't have the inclination)in about fifty million years. Of course then we'd need to work out the Kozai effect on all the planets and see how this correlates to our planet.

Hi Joe, you know that if you write a new post on the thread, then a notification is sent to all the subscribers. However, if you simply edit an old post, then nothing is sent out that directs subscribers to the edited post. It doesn't matter if you're just tidying up the odd typo but if you want comments on your edits, then it's best to quote your earlier post and then say how you want to alter it.

<b>[Stoat] " ... if you simply edit an old post, then nothing is sent out ... "</b>

Technically this is true - nothing is broadcast to the subscribers. However, the editing process does cause the "new post since your last visit" flag to be set, and all members see this the next time they visit. Also, a time stamp note is automatically added to the bottom of the editied post. But if your edit was not to the most recent post, there is no indication to the visitor of which post was edited. You have to search for it, manually, if you are interested.

(It is an old message board product. We have plans to replace it. No guess as to when that will actually happen, however.)

LB