Don’t worry, there’s no need to panic. Here’s the reason
Diagrams and animations showing planetary orbits tend to lie to us a little. Or rather, they simplify the orbits of the planets a lot so that teachers don’t have to explain centers of gravity to children who have yet to come to terms with the fact that the Earth . The way you are taught the orbits of the planets generally looks something like the video below.
How orbits work (including Earth’s)
But this, we were saying, is a simplified version. Although the Sun is the largest object in the Solar System, with about 1,048 times the mass of Jupiter, gravity is a two-way street. Just as the Earth exerts a gravitational pull on the Earth, you exert your own (much, much smaller) gravitational pull on the Earth. “Kepler’s third law describes the relationship between the masses of two objects mutually rotating around each other and the determination of the orbital parameters,” .
Barycenter near the Sun
For simplicity we say that the planets orbit the Sun. However, the center of gravity of Solar System objects is usually Neighbor to the Sun, since it provides the greatest mass, but thanks to the orbits and influence of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, it is rarely actually found within of the Sun. The orbits, therefore, look a little more like the video above by astronomer James O’Donoghue. As a result, the Earth does not currently orbit a point within of the Sun, since it is the center of gravity it is outside of it. We are orbiting around, rather than the Sun.
“Planets orbit the Sun in general terms,” explains O’Donoghue on X, “but technically they don’t orbit the Sun, because the gravitational influence of (mostly) Jupiter tells us that the planets must orbit a new point in space.”
Read more:
