As far as i know earth’s orbis is stable.
If i understand it correctly it means that small perturbations in earth’s position or mass won’t change its orbit (like a spring effect that goes back to its rest state unless you break it), but if i simply balance out sun’s newtonian gravity vs the centrifugal force any little change would modify earth’s orbital speed and distance from the sun, so there’s something i’m missing, otherwise anytime a meteor hits or we send stuff to space we would be changing earth’s orbit.
So, IF my initial statement is correct, earth’s orbit doesn’t change for small perturbation, how do we know so? Secondly how big a perturbation would you need to change earth’s orbit?
On the other hand, if earth’s orbit changes with any minumum change, how big of a change in orbit would be needed for us to sebsibly perceive it?
Thanks
In: 4
Well the thing is that our orbit isn’t fully stable. Our planet actually has measurable jitter in our orbit and our planet will undergo massive changes in its orbital path. The issue is timescale. On the human timescale these imperceptible changes (while measurable) are insignificant. The orbital changes takes millions of rotations (years) to affect. At that timescale (thousands of human lifetimes back to back) the orbital path appears stable.
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