A couple of years ago the Hale Bopp comet came around. Supposedly it comes around regularly, something like every thousand years. Here is the question: if the Hale Bopp comet has an effective orbit of a thousand years then it is orbiting around something. The comet came very close to the sun without being caught in its gravitational field. Therefore, the gravitational field of whatever Hale Bopp is orbiting around must be stronger than that of the sun at all points in Hale Bopp’s orbit. How then can the sun not be in this same gravitational field? Is it possible that we are in this gravitational field and because all matter is moving at the same speed we are unable to detect it, and this gravitational field only evidences itself when we are able to see an object of significantly different makeup orbiting in a different direction or at a different rate?
Someone please tell me what Hale Bopp is orbiting around so that my unscientific mind can sleep tonight.
“Its orbit is a very long, stretched out ellipse and the comet is part of our solar system in orbit around our Sun.”
Thanks. You put my mind at ease that we are not going to get sucked into a black hole or anything of that sort. Facts are the death of a healthy imagination.
The comet is still orbiting around the sun. Just because the sun is not near the center of the ellipse that is hale-bopp’s orbit doesn’t mean it’s not primary gravity well. Pluto takes 247 years to orbit the sun for comparison and is also in more of a ellipse than the other planets. Earth varies from 147 to 152 million k from the sun while pluto varies from 4.4 to 7.5 billion k from the sun. To understand more about orbits, look up Kepler’s laws on the web. There are a lot of cool physics sites that explain it better.
One thing I have to constantly remind myself - probably because I work in public relations and not physics - is that *all *matter exerts gravity. The sun, the planets and moons, people and objects here on earth, you, me, them, my cat lying here on the floor under my chair. Here at home, everything is sort of falling towards the earth, and the earth, in turn, is falling towards the sun. Here’s the kicker, though, the earth’s orbit is in a balance with the sun’s gravitational pull, so we don’t actually fall in and burn up.
