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
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
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