Is the solar system rotating on the same horizontal level or are they rotating in different positions in a 3D sphere around the sun?
In: Physics
As others have said they lie mostly on a horizontal plane. But the implication for us is that from our perspective on Earth, every object in the solar system will travel the same “path” in the sky. This is called the ecliptic. Once you understand the concept it becomes very easy to spot planets and differentiate them from stars.
I think it’s also interesting how you can basically conceptualize the geometry and know where the moon will be in the sky based on it’s current phase. A full moon happens when the moon is on the opposite side of the planet as the sun, so the full moon will begin to “rise” along the ecliptic as the sun is setting.
Each planet in the Solar system rotates around the Sun on a “horizontal level” (a plane) that is at most tilted by 6 degrees with respect to the orbits of other planets. The obliquity of these orbits is measured with respect to the Earth’s Equator, is around 22-23 degrees wrt the Equator and changes *very* slowly.
I assume by the solar system, you mean planets and other bodies orbiting around the sun
The short answer is, yes, predominantly most bodies orbiting the sun are in _almost_ the same horizontal level. I am quoting the relevant part and linking the article to explain why,
>Here’s the yes part of the answer, beginning with another astronomy definition; the Earth-sun plane is called the ecliptic. Most major planets in our solar system stay within 3 degrees of the ecliptic. Mercury is the exception; its orbit is inclined to the ecliptic by 7 degrees. The dwarf planet Pluto is a widely known exception to this rule. Its orbit is inclined to the ecliptic by more than 17 degrees.
>It makes sense that most large planets in our solar system stay near the ecliptic plane. Our solar system is believed to be about 4 1/2 billion years old. It’s thought to have arisen from an amorphous cloud of gas and dust in space. The original cloud was spinning, and this spin caused it to flatten out into a disk shape. The sun and planets are believed to have formed out of this disk, which is why, today, the planets still orbit in a single plane around our sun.
https://earthsky.org/space/planets-single-plane
Nope, they are on different planes of revolution.
[Check this out.](https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/do-the-planets-ever-align-with-one-another/)
Most of the stuff is rotating in roughly the same plane around the sun. Though there are a ton of small objects, principally in very long orbits, that rotate at other angles as well.
The stuff that all rotates in the same plane does so because of conservation of angular momentum. Basically, they all started off from the same big, rotating cloud of dust that formed the solar system. They were all rotating in different directions. However, as objects traveling around the center of mass of the cloud (where the sun is now) in different directions collided, some of this rotational motion was cancelled out. If you were to “average out” the direction of rotation about the center of the cloud, that’s the direction most things revolve around the sun travel. Since motion orthogonal (at a right angle to) this direction all got “canceled out,” most of the solar system rests on a plane.
The objects that don’t rotate on that plane are mostly objects the solar system has pulled in after it formed or are just a portion of the few, small objects that didn’t collide with much stuff in the early days of the solar system and happened to retain their odd angle of rotation about the sun.
Mostly, yes, possibly left over from the time the solar system was forming and everything was settling down.
Pluto’s the biggest exception; Mercury is next. Our own Moon, oddly, is only 5 degrees off the system’s ecliptic … AND has an orbit that’s always concave to the sun, so in some sense it’s co-orbiting the Sun with us, rather than orbiting us while we orbit the Sun, as almost all the system’s moons do to their planets.
–Dave, residual tidal forces, over a long period of time, align stuff’s orbits with the equator of what the stuff revolves around, if that’s rotating
Yes. Except for Pluto
Every object has gravity. Imagine your left hand is the sun and your right hand is Jupiter (or any other planet). Take a string and pull it taught. That’s why everything is on the same plane
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