4 ms·
L2 is neither a mountain or a crater, it's more like a saddle point
by WithinReason 5y ago
L2 is neither a mountain or a crater, it's more like a saddle point
- jakear 5y agoThanks, didn’t know that. Turns out there are no “crater” Lagrange points, so the analogy doesn’t really hold. But that also means there are no stable Lagrange points, so the question doesn’t hold either!
- WithinReason 5y agoIf by crater you mean having a "local minimum", then the L4 and L5 points are actually like that and can even capture asteroids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(celestial_body) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(celestial_body)
- jakear 5y agoHm, I cannot unify that claim with this diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point#/media/File:Lagrange_points2.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point#/media/File:Lag...
- harpersealtako 5y agoFrom that wiki page: >Although the L4 and L5 points are found at the top of a "hill", as in the effective potential contour plot above, they are nonetheless stable. The reason for the stability is a second-order effect: as a body moves away from the exact Lagrange position, Coriolis acceleration (which depends on the velocity of an orbiting object and cannot be modeled as a contour map)[20] curves the trajectory into a path around (rather than away from) the point.[20][22] Because the source of stability is the Coriolis force, the resulting orbits can be stable, but generally are not planar, but "three-dimensional": they lie on a warped surface intersecting the ecliptic plane. The kidney-shaped orbits typically shown nested around L4 and L5 are the projections of the orbits on a plane (e.g. the ecliptic) and not the full 3-D orbits.
- jakear 5y agoDamn astronomy is crazy. And the point still stands!
- reasonabl_human 5y agoMind blowing.. dang!!