So from what i’ve read, Jupiter’s moons ( Europa, Ganymede, Io) are basically squeezed, stretched and pulled in different directions by Jupiter’s gravity, and more or less by themselves.
How do they remain in a stable orbit ?
Do these gravitational forces cancel eachother out, thus creating a perfect stable orbit ?
In: Planetary Science
Yeah, they basically do cancel each other out because if they didn’t, they’d either crash into Jupiter, be flung away from Jupiter, or be ripped apart and turn into rings.
Only stable orbits exist because unstable orbits end themselves.
For the longest time the perceived “gap” between Mars and Jupiter bothered astronomers because the distance between Mercury to Venus, Venus to Earth, Earth to Mars was so regular, and then you have double that distance to Jupiter, and then the same to Saturn (and then later again as Uranus and Neptune were discovered)
This was later resolved with the discovery of Ceres (and then the rest of the asteroid belt)
That’s because stable orbits are generally multiples of each other, and, which is why the planets appear so regularly and why so many stable orbits can fit in the asteroid belt. It’s the same deal with Jupiter’s moons, just on a smaller scale
Latest Answers