When the Earth orbits around the sun, relatively speaking, does it circle in the same path each time?
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No. It’s ALL moving!! The Earth circles the Sun while the Sun moves along on its own path. So Earth is kinda doing a corkscrew thingy through space on and on forever.
Depends what you mean, the answer is always no but it’s less no some times than others. Relative to the sun, all celestial bodies undergo what is called precession, meaning that their elliptic orbits themselves get rotated a bit, so that the path they trace out over time looks like a flower, but with petals extremely close together. Each orbit is just a tiny sliver “off” from the previous one. This is because other things besides the sun and the earth exist. Jupiter is pretty massive and while it does orbit the sun, it exerts its own gravity on the rest of solar system. Just less gravity than the sun.
On the other hand, the sun is also not stationary. It orbits the galactic center. With respect to the galactic center, everything out here is zooming along at a million miles per hour (probably, i am a math guy but i don’t know the actual speed off the top of my head, it’s very fast). Relative to the galactic center, we are still making that flower shape around the sun, but also traveling along as we do, making it more like a slightly off kilter spiral.
The galaxy is also moving towards other galaxies. Nothing in the universe is truly stationary in any absolute sense. That’s relativity, folks.
Short answer yes.
Less short answer. In the absence of other planetary bodies, yes.
Long answer. Everything has mass (and by extension gravity) and pulls on everything which includes other distant galaxies. This means the planets in the solar system will slightly alter the Earth’s orbit, same as all galaxies in the universe.
Not five year old answer. The solar system is constantly moving through the universe so the earth TECHNICALLY will never be in the same spot twice because the solar system will also never be in the same spot twice.
Technically yes and no. Same orbit? Yes. We stay in the same path around our sun.
However our solar system itself is moving very very fast in relation to other stars etc, so technically the earth won’t ever be in the same space twice.
Nope. The earth orbits the sun. The sun orbits the Milky Way. The Milky Way is also moving. Everything is moving.
No, most fundamentally because “the same path” is a meaningless statement. All movement is relative so there is really no way to say an empty patch of space is the same patch or not. Independent of reference to other objects we can’t define something’s movement against some kind of underlying reference frame of space itself. That simply doesn’t exist!
So the entire universe could be stationary on average or moving at any speed under that of light, and all frames of reference in between are equally valid. That said our Sun is orbiting the center of our galaxy and relative to that reference point and the universe surrounding us Earth is charting a path it won’t repeat.
Short answer, no. Everything is traveling around
If you wanna see how the planets orbit the sun, take a look at this thread:
[Visual Representation of how our Solar System moves](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/awo500/visual_representation_of_how_the_solar_system/)
No.
Reason #1: our solar system is moving through the galaxy, so after the Earth has gone around the sun, the Sun is now in a new spot, so the Earth can’t be in the same spot again.
If you’re just talking about the Earth relative to the Sun, the answer is still no.
Reason #2: Everything has a gravitational pull. All the other planets are pulling on each other (and even our moon) so every year the Earth is pulled around slightly differently based on the position of the planets.
Any gravitational system with more than 3 bodies is chaotic (meaning very sensitive to the initial conditions), and it usually ends up with one body being ejected. Our solar system being in tact with so many planets over billions of years just means that we got lucky. We have no idea if a planet will be ejected in the next billion or so years, though.
Reason #3: general relativity. Gravity slows down time, and this affects the way planets orbit. If you look at Mercury’s orbit over several years, you’ll see that it actually drifts around (this is called the orbital precession) and it makes the orbit look more like a flower shape if you map it out over a few hundred years. This same thing happens to all the planets, but it’s much easier to notice with Mercury because it’s so much closer to the Sun, so it’s more strongly affected by the sun’s gravity.
For any purposes during your lifetime, the path of the Earth won’t change that much. It will be closest to the Sun in January (147 million km) and furthest away in July (152 million km) and take 365.2422 days to complete that orbit and that’s more information than you’ll ever need to worry about.
Everything is relative… and the answers are usually yes and no.
Relative to the sun, tehcnically no, but practically yes…ish, within our limited lifetime, it is as same as it can get.
It changes over a long period of time, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of years.
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But relative to the center of the galaxy or the universe itself… Same doesn’t really exist anymore, change is the fundamental law of everything.
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