02-18-2006, 04:25 AM
MEAT,Feb 17 2006, 02:21 AM Wrote:That reminds me of some rumor I heard awhile back. The rumor went something about a planet 'X' which had an ovular rotation around our sun instead of a circular one. Planet X is supposedly bigger than Jupiter and passes near Earth every 10,000 years causing earthquakes, flooding, and can even pull the Earth a distance from the sun causing global freezing but pulls it back into it's place 10,000 years later. Supposedly, this planet will pass near Earth in 2012, ironically the same time the Inca (or was that Azetc?) calendar ends, the Inca calendar counts backwards, from what, nobody knows.
Uh, several things here...
A rotation is when something spins on its axis. Revolution is when one thing orbits another. Planets revolve around the sun; they don't rotate around it. For Earth, we count one revolution to be one year and one rotation to be one day.
"Ovular" relates to ovaries. An orbit that is oval is said to be elliptical. In general, orbits are elliptical. Kepler (correctly) suggested this several hundred years ago, and Newton's calculus and physics backed him up on this. The rumor you heard was invented by someone with medieval notions of basic celestial mechanics.
-Lemmy