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Pluto's Outer Moons Orbit Chaotically, With Unpredictable Sunrises and Sunsets

StartsWithABang writes: Few things in this world are as regular as sunrise and sunset. With the application of a little physics, you can predict exactly where and when the sun will rise or set from any location on Earth. Thus far, every world in our Solar System — planet, moon and asteroid — has had the exact same experience as us. But out in the Kuiper belt, Pluto is different. The only known world in the Solar System where a significant fraction of the system's mass is not in a single component, the outer moons of the Pluto-Charon system provide a unique environment to study how planets might behave in orbit around binary stars. The amazing takeaway? The rotational part of the orbit is chaotic; the worlds tumble, and hence sunrises and sunsets are no longer predictable.

3 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Add one to your bounce rate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Click link
    Medium.com
    Click back

    At this point you could be posting next weeks lotto numbers, I still wouldn't read it.

  2. Re:Do they really mean "chaotic"? by srussia · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes. It's an n-body dynamical system.

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    Set your phasers on "funky"!
  3. Re:Do they really mean "chaotic"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They mean it's chaotic in that a small change in initial conditions throw your predictions completely off. It's "a bit harder" like the Mandelbrot set is "a bit more complicated than" a circle.