Subject: (urth) distance

From: maa32 <maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 04:29:13 +0000

Well, Blattid, since you put it so succinctly, the choice is easy.  Of course 
the 30,000 league figure is incorrect!  Which means that Green might only 
fluctuate a tiny amount from its 80,000 league distance, which is where the 
moon is in our day.  Of course, this means that the inhumu have to fly a long 
way, but that's cool with me (after all, that tree ship can fly a long way, 
too - and I don't think they are much different).

And this distance, closer to 80,000, wouldn't screw up the tides as much and 
wouldn't seem to be such a weird system; it might just fluctuate a little bit, 
like a moon in a slightly unstable orbit due to recent gravitational 
disturbances.  In this case, a new sun coming. Sure, let's say that Green is 
at 60,000 leagues at conjunction, making it ... about the same size as Lune.

Thanks!  You made everything so much easier!  So we know that the moon was 
moved from about 80 to 50 thousand leagues in Severians day ... a fluctuation 
of about 30 thousand leagues ... if a new gravitational vortex where to 
disrupt this system, would the moon act like a gyroscope and oscillate in and 
out of orbit, first close and then far, between 60 and 100 thousand leagues, 
until it reached a stable orbit somewhere around 80,000?  Like an old 
fashioned weight scale: you step on it, and then it goes back and forth until 
it reaches equilibrium, and equal distance on the up and down swing until 
there is no perceptible movement.

Would a new gravitational well induce this kind of alteration in an orbit?  
Could this continue for a long time, reducing a little bit over time?  Also, 
let's keep in mind that the moon is proportionally very large for a satellite 
when compared with the earth's mass.  It is huge compared to the satellites of 
most of the gas giants.

I hereby gladly revoke my uncritical acceptance of 30,000 leagues.  You guys 
were so right; that figure sucks. That astronomer is one shady dude!
Thanks.
Marc Aramini

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 18:26:09 +0000

> Well, Blattid, since you put it so succinctly, the choice is easy.  Of
> course the 30,000 league figure is incorrect!  Which means that Green
> might only fluctuate a tiny amount from its 80,000 league distance, 

I'm no orbit mechanic, but that seems unlikely with a six-year period,
and _very_ unlikely to cause the inhumi to be able to cross only for a 
short period.

> Thanks!  You made everything so much easier!  

Oh. Good.

> So we know that the moon was moved from about 80 to 50 thousand
> leagues in Severians day 

Ahem. We do not know that it "was moved." I believe that most models
suggest that the Moon _will_ in fact move closer over (geological) 
time.

> ... the moon is proportionally very large for a satellite when compared
> with the earth's mass.  It is huge compared to the satellites of most
> of the gas giants.

Correct; we are actually best regarded as a double-planet system. (The
center about which the Earth-Moon system mutually orbits is, if I am not 
mistaken, not actually inside the Earth.) 

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From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 19:56:04 +0000

> and _very_ unlikely to cause the inhumi to be able to cross only for a 

I quite agree.

> suggest that the Moon _will_ in fact move closer over (geological) 

Not that I've ever heard.  See for example
<http://www.astronomynotes.com/angmom/s2.htm>,
<http://www.ridgenet.net/~do_while/sage/v2i2f.htm>, and with the
least detail but the greatest appearance of reliability,
<http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_earth.html#earthslow>.  I think it's
extremely unlikely that our moon turned into Severian's Lune on its
own.

> mistaken, not actually inside the Earth.) 

Not quite.  The formula for the position of the center of mass is
x_cm = (m_moon x_moon + m_earth x_earth) / (m_moon + m_earth), where
x's are positions and m's are masses.  If we let x_earth be 0 and
use the radius of the moon's orbit for x_moon, we find the center
of mass to be about 4620 km from the center of the earth, less than
the radius of the earth, which is about 6380 km.

Jerry Friedman

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From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 20:44:52 +0000

--- maa32 <maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu> wrote:
...
> until it reached a stable orbit somewhere around 80,000?

The only possible orbits, once the disrupting force has stopped, are
the familiar ellipses and the parabolic and hyperbolic escape orbits.

> Like an old 

Gravity doesn't work that way (unless there are other forces, like
those of a spring or a string).

> Would a new gravitational well induce this kind of alteration in an

Nope.

> Could this continue for a long time, reducing a little bit over time? 

Nope.  Sorry to be so negative, but I really don't see how the Blue-
Green system can work the way Wolfe sketchily describes it, unless
there's some weird solution to the three-body problem that I don't
know about.  Or unless the planets have something like giant rocket
engines on them or a very long cable between them.  (Aha!  Now we
know how the inhumi cross!)
...

Jerry Friedman

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 21:11:20 +0000

Jerry -- Hey, I said I'm no orbital mechanic!

I remembered that the E/M system orbited a mutual center which wasn't
the center of the Earth; obviously I was a bit off about where it was.

As for the Moon getting closer to the Earth, well, that's just stuff
I remember from like 1960s LIFE magazines...

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From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 05:02:46 +0000

>      From:  
          "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com

> suggest that the Moon _will_ in fact move closer over (geological) 

	It's moving away, a fact available to SF writers through such obscure
channels as the "Peanuts" comic strip. This is because of an obscure
means of conserving angular momentum lost by the earth from tides on the
moon; this may point to fiddling by Abaia or other Dark Lords, as moving
Lune closer and increasing its mass/gravity would make tides more
severe, something directly impacting Abaia's aquatic minions.

	This kind of mechanics may have escaped a simple potato chip engineer,
but as an SF writer with such sublime grasp of quantum electrodynamics
that he can dramatize them as "How I Lost the Second World War and
Helped Turn Back the German Invasion," I can only wonder.
 
> mistaken, not actually inside the Earth.) 

	You are mistaken; the barycenter is about 1000 miles deep inside the
earth at all times. But this is not necessarily meaningful; the
Jupiter-Sol barycenter is outside the sun, but no one's suggesting this
is a binary solar system.

-- 
Jeff Wilson
How Am I Posting? 1-800-555-6789
"If your SecOp can see you, so can the enemy." -Cpt Law

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