A Decuple Syzygy: Is It Physically Possible in Our Solar System?

[DonRocks]

Okay, half the people reading have no earthly (pun intended) clue as to what I'm talking about, so let me define some terms:

Decuple (pronounced deck-CUP-pull) means "10" just like Triple means "3" or Quadruple means "4."

Syzygy is an Astronomical term that's very simple: Anytime three celestial bodies are in a line, you have syzygy (it's nothing more than "a configuration.") The pronunciation is easy too: SIH-zih-gee.

For example, anytime you have an eclipse, you have syzygy (three bodies in alignment), but an eclipse is just one of many, many examples.

Here's one more term that many of you have probably heard: the "Transit of Venus." We had one of these a few years ago, and it's when Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun - the problem being that Venus is so small that you don't even notice it's happening. If Venus was large enough to block out the sun (it isn't), you'd have an eclipse; what you have instead is a Transit of Venus. And, you also have syzygy, i.e., the Sun, Venus, and Earth are all in alignment: You could draw a hypothetical straight line, and it would touch all three celestial bodies.

So, my mind started to drift, and I began to wonder ...

On Mar 21, 1894, from the perspective of Saturn (i.e., you're standing on Saturn), there were two simultaneous transits that took place: the Transit of Venus *and* the Transit of Mercury. Now bear in mind, this is from the perspective of Saturn - time for another term defined:

An Astronomical Unit is the average distance that the Earth is from the Sun. Since Earth's orbit is elliptical, it's almost always a little more than 1 AU, or a little less than 1 AU. The actual distance is exactly 1 AU at exactly two moments per year: during the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and even then, it's only for an instant - a period of time so short in duration that it essentially doesn't even exist.

Okay, so the Earth is about 1 AU away from the Sun. Saturn, however, is almost 10 AUs away from the Sun, or about ten-times the distance from the Sun as the Earth is. So you can imagine how small the Sun would look if you were standing on Saturn. I don't know if it would be 1/10th the size, because I don't know if it's an exact inverse (I suspect it's more complicated than that, but regardless, the Sun would look pretty damned small).

Now, I'm not certain that these simultaneous transits resulted in a quadruple syzygy. For a quadruple syzygy to have happened, you would need to be able to draw a mathematically perfect straight line, and have it touch the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn. Just because both Mercury and Venus were in transit doesn't necessarily mean they were in a straight line, but given how small the Sun must look from Saturn, they must have been pretty damned close - for a quadruple syzygy to have occurred, there would have had to have been a Venus-Mercury eclipse that took place during the double transit (I'm not even sure there's a term for this): Venus would have needed to eclipse Mercury *while* the two were in transit of the Sun (does that make sense?) In that case, you would have had a quadruple syzygy (again, I don't even know if this is a term); otherwise, you would have instead had two "regular" syzygys that happened to be *really* close together.

I'm proposing the possibility of an decuple syzygy: I'm wondering if it is theoretically and physically possible for someone to be (hypothetically) standing on Pluto, and have every single planet in alignment. In other words, you could draw a straight line that would be touching the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto - ten celestial bodies that you could draw a line through.

Actually, it doesn't matter if someone is standing on Pluto or not; the only thing that matters is the alignment.

Assuming time sprawls forward into infinity, and that each planet orbits the sun at a different velocity, it's perfectly logical to hypothesize that, at some point - maybe trillions or quadrillions of years from now (assuming the Sun doesn't explode) - all ten celestial bodies in our solar system will be in alignment. Bear in mind: The planets all orbit the sun in the same plane; otherwise, this might be mathematically impossible; given that they *do* orbit in the same plane, I don't see how it *can't* happen, at some point in the ever-so-distant future. It should not take a very complex computer model to predict the exact moment in time when this would occur.

It can actually become even more complicated than the scenario I've proposed: Some planetary moons are larger than Pluto, and Ceres - a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt - isn't all that far behind Pluto in size. So, yes, you could perhaps have dodecuple syzygy if 12 bodies were to be in alignment.

Any thoughts on this, other than that I should maybe get a life, and maybe work on my restaurant reviews?

[sheldman]

Clearly it can't happen, because if it could happen in the future it almost certainly must have already happened in the past, and if it had happened the solar system would have become so unbalanced that it would have started spinning in an eccentric way - basically a shaky orbit around Pluto, plus the effect of a "whip" on an ice skating rink - and our entire solar system would have careened into a black hole somewhere.  So, no.  QED.

[DonRocks]

14 hours ago, sheldman said:

Clearly it can't happen, because if it could happen in the future it almost certainly must have already happened in the past, and if it had happened the solar system would have become so unbalanced that it would have started spinning in an eccentric way - basically a shaky orbit around Pluto, plus the effect of a "whip" on an ice skating rink - and our entire solar system would have careened into a black hole somewhere.  So, no.  QED.

I generally know when I'm being fucked with, but this was just subtle enough where I don't.

What you say is obviously not true, but I'm not convinced that *you* think it's not true, and it's bugging the hell out of me. 

[porcupine]

20 hours ago, DonRocks said:

The actual distance is exactly 1 AU at exactly two moments per year: during the vernal and autumnal equinoxes,

Do you have a source for this? It doesn't make sense, given that perihelion is in early January and aphelion is in early July. Or does it have something to do with Kepler's second law? I am confused.

You would probably enjoy this article from timeanddate.com.  Excerpt:

"The dates when Earth reaches the extreme points on its orbit are not fixed because of the variations in its eccentricity. In 1246, the December Solstice was on the same day as the Earth reached its Perihelion. Since then, the Perihelion and Aphelion dates have drifted by a day every 58 years. In the short-term, the dates can vary up to 2 days from one year to another.

Mathematicians and astronomers estimate that in the year 6430, over 4000 years from now, the timing of the Perihelion and the March Equinox will coincide"

---

"The Earth's Tilt and Rotation" (DonRocks)

[DonRocks]

I continued the Tilt and Rotation discussion in a separate thread (remember, if you click on the curly little arrow on the top-right of the quoted post (go there, try it, and see!), you can always get back to the original conversation from which it was split, so we always have forwards and backwards pointers, thus never losing the context of the original conversation). 

One interesting thing that popped into my head just now is that this seemingly complex conversation about decuple syzygy is not much more than a variation on the classic "lowest common multiple" problem in math that we learn about in middle-school (elementary-school?) arithmetic - that seems hard to believe, but it's absolutely true. I'm sure that at some point, calculus would make its way into this discussion, but we're not even close to that point yet (though I would love for it to happen).

[Al Dente]

The planets aren't on the exact same plane, though most are pretty close, so I don't think you'd ever have an exact straight line. Pluto (yeah, yeah, it's not a planet), for instance, is on a plane that is 17 degrees off from the the rest of the planets. 

I found this quote here:

Quote

The planets in our solar system never line up in one perfectly straight line like they show in the movies. If you look at a two-dimensional plot of the planets and their orbits on a piece of paper you may be lead to believe that all the planets will circle around to the same line eventually. In reality, the planets do not all orbit perfectly in the same plane. Instead, they swing about on different orbits in three dimensional space. For this reason, they will never be perfectly aligned. It's like waiting for a swarm of flies circling your head to all line up.

 

[DonRocks]

21 minutes ago, Al Dente said:

The planets aren't on the exact same plane, though most are pretty close, so I don't think you'd ever have an exact straight line. Pluto (yeah, yeah, it's not a planet), for instance, is on a plane that is 17 degrees off from the the rest of the planets. 

I see. I was under the impression that all 8 planets *but not Pluto* were in the same orbital plane (which is one of several reasons Pluto was downgraded to being a "dwarf planet").

I realized after writing that I should have used Neptune as my example, but I didn't go back and change things.

Anyway, this is the first I've heard that Mercury-through-Neptune aren't in the same plane.

"Why Do All Planets Orbit in the Same Plane?" by Dave Kornreich on curious.astro.cornell.edu

Another interesting analogy I thought of was randomly placing a 33 1/3 RPM (12 inches), 45 RPM (7 inches) and 78 RPM (10 inches) record on three identical turntables - eventually, they'll all three reach the exact starting point of the songs.

 

[Al Dente]

If the planets were on the same plane, wouldn't you see more frequent transits of Mercury and Venus?

[DonRocks]

51 minutes ago, Al Dente said:

If the planets were on the same plane, wouldn't you see more frequent transits of Mercury and Venus?

You're absolutely correct. An even easier-to-visualize example is the fact that our moon revolves around the Earth.

So the gravity from the planets themselves, I suppose (is it because of the planets?), throws off any notion of an "exact plane" and introduces the notion of a "general plane" - in other words, the planets are "about on the same plane." 

Well done, Al Dente. It frustrates me when I see someone post an occasional Facebook video of Michio Kaku explaining something interesting, accompanied with #IFuckingLoveScience, and then go back to posting pictures of cats and listing every detail about prepping for their triathlon. Well, I suppose different websites have different functions - hell, we love Cats too, and we've had two Fit for Summer Challenges; it's just that if you don't want to see them, you don't have to go there. I was once *lambasted* for "atomizing" topics here (that was the exact word used), but I want people to see a topic title and know what they're going to be reading - that is exactly why I split off our conversation about the Earth's Tilt and Rotation just today - as long as you have forward pointers and backward pointers, nothing is lost (the problem I have is that sometimes I do it too soon, and admittedly, that's a personal flaw because it *can* kill the momentum of a conversation - I'm working on changing how I do this, but sometimes if I don't do it then-and-there, I forget to do it at all).

This doesn't necessarily invalidate the possibility of a decuple syzygy (after all, there *are* Transits), but it *might*, if it's physically impossible for every planet to line up - and it might be for the very reason that you cite. I really appreciate people who *think about things*, weighing the various issues, and what you just did was a shining example of thinking. It wasn't necessarily anything brilliant, but it shows that you have a curious spirit, and that you question things. Man, what a world this place would be if everyone did this.

[Al Dente]

I found this *very* approximate visual:

[DonRocks]

3 hours ago, Al Dente said:

I found this *very* approximate visual:

It *still* might be possible because the smallest planets have the innermost orbits (I'm leaving out Pluto, of course). Neptune might be the problem planet, although even that is pretty darned big. However, if this drawing is to scale, the width of the plane seems to be wider than the Sun is large, which might make it impossible under any circumstances.

If it can be shown that a Transit (or Eclipse) between the Sun and *any two* planets in the solar system is impossible, that's sufficient to disprove the possibility of a decuple syzygy (if you can't have three in a line, you can't have all ten in a line). 

Interestingly, even if it can be shown that a Transit (or Eclipse) between the Sun and every single combination of two planets in the solar system is possible, that is *not* sufficient to prove the possibility of a decuple (or, without Pluto, nonuple) syzygy (you'll need to ponder that one for awhile).

Relative to the Sun, even Jupiter is teeny-tiny, so I seriously doubt this is possible - the fact that the planets aren't in the same plane is probably what unravels this theory. If they *were* in the same plane, I think it would not only be possible, but inevitable (assuming some rogue event didn't transpire).

This sort of makes you less susceptible to stressing out about things. My God we're insignificant.

I wonder if a creature in Andromeda cares about the Gates Foundation - my guess is "probably not." And yet, what else is there?

Ah, yes - there's donrockwell.com! Yes! Yes! Yes! I'm going to make a backup copy and launch it into space.

I wonder if Water Bears rule the Earth. Not giving a shit whether you live or die is a *powerful* weapon, not to mention that they're nearly impossible to kill anyway.