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My last few days have been blighted with doubts about why things often seem to happen on a flat plain in space. As I understand it, which isn't very well, the planets orbit the sun on pretty much a flat plane.
I'm wondering why this is, and why shouldn't there being planets going over and under the sun rather than obediently around it. (I think Pluto may make some vein attempt at this). I suspect the reason is the same for the rings of Saturn (why not a sphere) or Galaxies apparently also being quite flat.
I have a number of theories, all crap. Anyone cast some light on this?
Regards,
Rob Philpott.
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I watched the movie 'Interstellar' yesterday (good movie) and they depicted a black whole as a sphere.
I thought it was a nice switch from the usual flat disk that sucks everything up.
As to your question:
No clue 
Tom
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I haven't seen Interstellar but have read some articles about the science.
The depiction of the black hole was quite interesting. The accretion disk is actually fairly flat. In the movie it looks like a sphere because of the bending of light around the black hole. As I understand it, the light from the far side of the accretion disk that you would expect to go over the top of the black hole and not enter your eye is bent by the warping of space around the hole. The light from the far side enters your eye but appears to be coming from above the black hole and so it looks like there is accretion disk above. -- A little like a normal mirage where light from the sky is bent and appears to be on the road ahead. --
Apparently, they had to write their own rendering software because all existing software assumes light travels in straight lines, which is vastly not true near a black hole. The story goes that they set their new software an overnight rendering job to see what the accretion disk would look like. There was surprise at first when they saw the result but worked out why they got the result when they thought carefully about how light would be bent near the hole.
(Found a link http://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/[^])
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Interesting.
The movie has a few scenes in it with the black whole. At first it was very strange and somewhat difficult to understand what your looking at.
I like movies that challenge the way you think
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Light does travel in straight lines.
It is the space that is curved
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I only know that when I drink too much I go down flat and everything starts to orbit. 
Geek code v 3.12
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- r++>+++ y+++*
Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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You are not drunk as long as you can still lie on the ground without holding onto something.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
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If you get sufficiently drunk and lie down, you will find the room rotates instead.
There is a solution to this: tie the room down. Get some rope, tie one end to the room, and the other to the only stable thing in the universe - youself. A foot is good. Now when you lie down, the room will be unable to rotate because it can't drag you round and it all stays still.
Try it, it works.
Important note: try to remember about the rope round your ankle before you make a trip to the loo in the dark...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I actually enjoyed the ride when I got home and fell into bed.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
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MTMI 
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No, I never did this at the Medical Technology Management Institute.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
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I think the key to Saturn's rings at least is accretion discs. I.e the material that makes up both the planet and its discs was a rotating mass before the planet formed.
Once rotating, the equator of a body has a larger circumference than one that passes through each of the poles. This then helps to keep the rings bound to the same plane as the equator.
Not sure about galaxies or solar systems though - however I suspect that similar forces are at play.
--
On a side note, while looking for an answer I discovered that one of Saturn's moons is emitting some 1000kg/s of water vapour from it's South pole, which is then ionized and rotates around Saturn. Neat stuff. Thanks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Saturn[^]
"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life." - John Lennon
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enhzflep wrote: the equator of a body has a larger circumference than one that passes through each of the poles
That seems to me to require that body in question be an oblate spheroid.
«I'm asked why doesn't C# implement feature X all the time. The answer's always the same: because no one ever designed, specified, implemented, tested, documented, shipped that feature. All six of those things are necessary to make a feature happen. They all cost huge amounts of time, effort and money.» Eric Lippert, Microsoft, 2009
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Yup. Sorry for being imprecise. 
"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life." - John Lennon
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I've thought about this before and my theory is:
1. Varying strengths of gravitational forces depending upon the plane in which something is orbiting is in (so everything over time settles into the gravitational plane where the strength is greatest), combined with..
2. Everything that wasn't in that plane has at some point collided with another object and either merged with it, adopted the same orbit (according to rule 1) or been knocked out of orbit.
That's just my guess though, if anyone knows better it'd be interesting to hear
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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it´s a feature of rotating bodies.
it makes sense really, something in the ecliptical plane has sufficient speed (and thus force => centrifugal force) to counteract the force of gravity. The more above or below the ecliptical plane you are the less counterforce you have for the gravity and thus you fall into damnation (or into the planet). The rotation is caused similar to putting satellites into orbit. They still fall, but the speed is sufficiently large to miss the ground. And let that just be the knack of flying  .
So basically it starts out as a "sphere" of debris, but only the debris in the ecliptical plane survives .
Hope this makes sense
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The angular momentum wasn't evenly distributed, and one specific direction "won". The rest cancelled out by collision.
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This is the correct answer. And the same answer applies to all systems: why most of the mass of our solar system orbits near the ecliptic; why Saturn's rings are flat; why galaxies are flat; why most moons orbit in the same direction and plane as their planet's equator; etc.
That which has not yet "canceled out by collision" remains spherically distributed, i.e., the Oort cloud on the outer reaches of our solar system.
And, of course, there were local maxima and minima in the original distribution of angular momentum, which could explain, for example, retrograde orbits and why Uranus and its largest moon Triton rotate and revolve in a different plane from most of the rest of the solar system.
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Organizing Principle?
There probably *were* other bodies going in various orbits at one time...they all collided, over and over, sometimes breaking up into smaller pieces which tended to follow the majority of bigger pieces (sometimes absorbing them due to higher gravity) that travelled in the same direction and on the same plane...eventually all that is left are things that occupy their own safe orbit on the same plane.
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I *think* the narrator of that *may* be lacking his meds; or have taken too much.
veni bibi saltavi
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That looks like just the ticket! Unfortunately I need to wait until I get home to click the link. Doing so is not in the interests of my employer. 
Regards,
Rob Philpott.
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That's a very cute explanation of particle collapses.
Shame it's not believed to be relevant to our solar system.
Lookit: if one of the big lumps of our solar system were to decide to go off in a non-planar orbit (as they have many times in the past, through collisions, etc.), the gravity of all the other, lumps whizzing past them would slowly pull them back into the plane, and also "correct" their velocities.
To avoid that, they would need something to give them a drastic change in velocity.
So, the rule is: If you want to jump out of the plane, take a parachute.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Space Weevils.
They nest in rocks, and obviously grouped them together to make building nests easier...
[In reality it's Conservation of Momentum: when gravity collapsed the original cloud the solar system was formed from, this caused the trivial spin it started with (the average "movement" of all molecules was in one direction or the other, a "zero-average" momentum is a very unlikely case) to increase in the same way that a ballerina pulling her arms inward spins faster.
Once the mass is spinning "properly" a disk forms as it's the least-energy configuration.
Same thing happens with planets and moons on a smaller scale.]
But I prefer the Space Weevils.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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